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doxeuropean Documentary magazineSummer 2013 #98

The wagner filesWagner’S life anD Work aS tranSmeDiaTwo new series:interactive Storytelling SounD DeSign

in focus: paTricio guzmána muSeum of amneSia

hoT docs 20Th anniversarya hiStorical overvieW

10 euro i 75 Dkr i 90 nok i 110 Sek

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IDFA The annual documentary event that simply cannot be missed 20 November – 1 December 2013Deadline for entry: 1 August

IDFA Forum A first-class meeting place to get your documentary financed 25 – 27 November 2013Deadline for entry: 1 September

Docs for Sale Watch films online and do business in Amsterdam 22 – 29 November 2013Deadlines for entry: various, see www.idfa.nl/industry

IDFAcademy Up-to-date market information, workshops and inspirational meetings with documentary professionals21 – 24 November 2013Deadline for accreditation: 10 October

IDFA WorldView Summer School 1 – 6 July 2013

IDFA Bertha Fund Making new voices heardDeadlines for entry: 1 February and 15 May 2014

Deadline for accreditation: 10 october

IDFA TV IDFA’s online documentary channel streams complete documentaries, festival reports, master classes and more: www.idfa.tv/en

info@idfa.nl | www.idfa.nl/industryFollow us on Facebook (IDFA Industry), or subscribe for the IDFA Newsletter on idfa.nl/industry

International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam

We look forward to welcoming you in November at our 26th festival.

annonce

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Documentary can reinforce or challenge our perspective on different parts of our world. In this issue our focus is on artists, documentary filmmakers, and interactive storytellers, who work with redefining, reworking and re-using historical, political and personal memory.

Patricio Guzmán’s body of work makes us aware of the fragments of history that have been swept under the carpet, Ken Loach’s new documentary The Spirit of ’45 revisits post-war Britain and redefines our concept of socialism, and on the 200th anniversary of Wagner’s birth, the transmedia project The Wagner Files invites us to see the composer’s life and work in a completely new framework.

The interactive documentaries have a special place in this issue and they too are invested with memory and history. They want the viewer/user to actively engage. From Suharto’s theme park in Indonesia in 17.000 Islands the user is challenged to reconstruct certain images of history and thus play with representation and history. In Alma: A Tale of Violence the personal memory of violence is in focus. And it is the perpetrator who is allowed to bear witness.

In relation to history and the re-interpretation of history, interactive documentaries create interesting possibilities. Here is it possible to play around with points of view, with causality, and bring dynamic readings into play. History is not set in stone.

Interactive documentaries also have a unique potential to bring us out of our comfort zone. There is often an absence of stories that tie up their own loose ends in interactive documentaries and that in itself involves a loss of comfort. We are also made partly responsible for our own experience, a self-revelation that can be both amusing and uncomfortable.

Film as well as interactive works can both work to put the pain back into killing, but also to desensitize; it can prepare us for trauma and violence and help us overcome it. This is the theme of the book Killer Images, from which we’ve been allowed to publish an excerpt. In one chapter, Harun Farocki writes about his work with Immersion, where an interactive work is used as a way to help soldiers recover from trauma. Recovery through immersing their senses in the very experience they are trying to forget.

Documentary is an incredible space for the interaction of memory, history, and sensual experience. Whether via the senses or the mind, it should move us. It can move us out of our comfort zone, our mindset or the mundane. As long as it moves us._

Move!

IDFA The annual documentary event that simply cannot be missed 20 November – 1 December 2013Deadline for entry: 1 August

IDFA Forum A first-class meeting place to get your documentary financed 25 – 27 November 2013Deadline for entry: 1 September

Docs for Sale Watch films online and do business in Amsterdam 22 – 29 November 2013Deadlines for entry: various, see www.idfa.nl/industry

IDFAcademy Up-to-date market information, workshops and inspirational meetings with documentary professionals21 – 24 November 2013Deadline for accreditation: 10 October

IDFA WorldView Summer School 1 – 6 July 2013

IDFA Bertha Fund Making new voices heardDeadlines for entry: 1 February and 15 May 2014

Deadline for accreditation: 10 october

IDFA TV IDFA’s online documentary channel streams complete documentaries, festival reports, master classes and more: www.idfa.tv/en

info@idfa.nl | www.idfa.nl/industryFollow us on Facebook (IDFA Industry), or subscribe for the IDFA Newsletter on idfa.nl/industry

International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam

We look forward to welcoming you in November at our 26th festival.

eDItorVibeke Bryld vibeke@dox.dk

AssIstAntLaura Bonde Pedersen laura@dox.dk

Art DIrectorAgnete Schepelern agnete@agnetes.dk

LAnguAge eDItorNicole Fishlock––––––––––––––––

supported by the culture programme of the european union This project has been funded with support from the European Commission. This publication reflects the views only of the author, and the Commission cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained therein.

eDItorIAL poLIcyDOX is an independent international magazine committed to stimulate a progressive and informative dialogue on documentary film, film making and film viewing.

pubLIsherEDN - European Documentary NetworkVognmagergade 10, 11120 Copenhagen K, DenmarkTel: +45 33131122Fax: +45 33131144Email: edn@edn.dkwww.edn.dk

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©2013 by DOX/EDNNo part of this material may be reproduced without the publisher’s permission.

This issue has been made possible with the support of

WorDs ViBEKE BryLD

editorial

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conTribuTors

WrItersSuvi Andrea Helminen, documentary filmmaker.Peter Albrechtsen, sound designer.Marc Glassman, editor of Canada’s leading documentary magazine POV and the Directors Guild of Canada’s publication Montage.Nicolò Gallio, PhD Candidate in Film Studies and audience designer.Hussain Currimbhoy, film programmer, Sheffield Doc/Fest.Willemien Sanders, film critic.Harriette yahr, filmmaker.Pamela Cohn, producer and arts journalist .Bianca-Olivia Nita, film critic.Mikkel Stolt, documentary filmmaker and producer.Steffen Moestrup, film critic.Simran Hans, writer.Harun Farocki, filmmaker, artist, and professor.Joshua Oppenheimer, filmmaker and Artistic Director of the Centre for Documentary and Experimental Film at the University of Westminster.Joram Ten Brink, filmmaker and professor of film.yunqian yan, film critic.Truls Lie, documentary filmmaker and film critic at Le Monde diplomatique, Scandinavian edition.

photogrApherSophie Winqvist, DFF, Swedish Director of Photography.

Photo from John Lundberg’s Mirage Men. See review on page 43

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3 ediTorial Focus of the issue: reworking history and the possibilities of interactive documentary

6 sound series: parT 1Sound designer Peter Albrechtsen looks at the craftsmanship behind the soundscape of Zidane, A 21st Century Portrait

8 in focus: paTricio guzmánPatricio Guzmán discusses the fundamental role of documentary in relation to memory, history and poetry

12 favouriTesProgrammer of Sheffield Doc/Fest, Hussain Currimbhoy, shares his favourite films from the last year of docs

14 inTeracTive series: parT 1Documentary filmmaker Suvi Andrea Helminen visits SXSW and looks at some of the challenges inherent in interactive storytelling

18 visions du réel: The wagner filesOn the 200th anniversary of his birth, Richard Wagner’s life and work are transformed into a transmedia project

22 phoTo series: saTaSophie Winquist frames her Cuban images with inspiration from wasp-striped hot pants

26 iffr: documenTary performanceWillemien Sanders debates self construction in documentary

28 hoT docs 20Th anniversary: parT 1Marc Glassman provides a historical overview of the founding years of Hot Docs

30 hoT docs: case sTudyDirector Linda Västrik shares her incredible tale of the making of Forest of the Dancing Spirits

33 essay: new chinese documenTaryChinese documentary challenges the authorities’ power over the past

36 sundance film fesTival: documenTs from The usPolitics, economics, and the Occupy Movement are the focus of a cluster of documentaries this year

39 edn news

40 reviewsTo the WolfThe Spirit of ´45Alma – A Tale of ViolenceMirage MenDummy Jim17.000 IslandsMama Europa

48 excerpT: Killer imagesKiller Images published in 2012, edited by Joram Ten Brink and Joshua Oppenheimer, explores different aspects of cinema’s relationship to violence. We bring an excerpt from the book

52 dvd in This issue: el olvidoPamela Cohn talks to director Heddy Honigmann about her work with El Olvido

index

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ediTors choice: dvd in This issue el olvidodirector Heddy Honigmann, Producer Carmen Cobos, the Netherlands, 2008, 93 min. a Cobos Films production in co production with iKoN & ZdF-artedistribution: Films transit international inc. www.filmstransit.comEl Olvido is a film about a forgotten nation whose people – through irony, determination and the power of memory – defy anonymity.

Photo credit front page:The Wagner Files, ralf Pleger, 2013. Courtesy of Falco Seliger. See also pages 18-21

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InsIDe the eArs of An Icon

In the first of a series of articles on sound design in documentary, Peter Albrechtsen – a sound designer himself – focuses on the visionary sound design of Zidane, A 21st Century Portrait. The film’s sound designer and mixer reveal the stories behind the extraordinary soundscapes

in the alternative portrait of the soccer superstar Zinédine Zidane.

WorDs PETEr ALBrECHTSEN * photos COUrTESy OF ANNA LENA FiLMS/PALOMAr

“Football as never seen before. Mesmerising.”“The greatest film about football ever made.”“A hypnotic experience.”

These are some of the ecstatic reviews of the film Zi-dane, A 21st Century Portrait (original title: Zidane, un portrait du 21e siècle). And it truly is a football film

like no other. It was released back in 2006 and has since then achieved almost cult status with its extraordinary vi-sion of the stadium experience.

Great movies about soccer are actually quite rare, maybe because soccer is all over the media all the time and we’re very used to experiencing soccer in a certain way. Pretty much all TV transmissions depict the average soccer match in the same way, with aerial shots of the field combined with a few close-ups now and then. Even most of the people who hate soccer are very used to this kind of visual vocabulary.

Zidane, A 21st Century Portrait is doing things a lot dif-ferently. It’s focused purely on Zidane during a game be-tween Real Madrid and Villarreal CF and was filmed in real time using 17 synchronized cameras, supervised by the highly acclaimed photographer Darius Khondji, most fa-mous for his work on David Fincher’s Se7en and Michael Haneke’s Amour.

In the visual sense, the film actually bears a similarity to Football As Never Before (Fußball wie noch nie), a documen-tary made in 1970 by acclaimed German filmmaker Hell-muth Costard about Manchester United footballer George Best. In the experimental film Costard used eight 16mm film cameras to follow Best, in real time, for the course of an entire game. But there’s one specific, major difference between the two: the sound design.

To really utilize the full potential of the soundtrack you need directors who are aware of how sound and music can enhance the experience. And when talking to the French sound designer Selim Azzazi and the Oscar-winning mixer Tom Johnson, it’s evident that the directors, Philippe Par-reno and Douglas Gordon, who are both visual artists, were

very aware of the significance of sound and music – the sound editing process lasted almost four months, as there’s very little left of the original location sound. Zidane himself is actually looped afterwards.

“We had deaf-mute persons come and try to analyze on screen what Zidane and a few of the other players were saying. Then we had Zidane say the spotted words and a few others,” Selim reveals. And that was just a small part of Selim’s work, as the sound design process also included several special recording sessions to record crowd and foot-ball sounds.

“We went to Madrid in order to properly record another game and hoping the final score would be about the same as the Villareal game and thereby getting corresponding crowd reactions – and fortunately it did”, says Selim Azzazi.

“We were three recordists recording various crowds – medium perspectives, close-ups, singings etc. The night before that we even had access to the empty stadium for an hour to record shouts, applause, whistles, plastic seats, all with the real acoustics of the Santiago Bernabéu Stadium.”

“The day before that and the day after we wandered the city of Madrid recording various chatters from every place – parks, university, bars, streets. The next day we also had the opportunity to record a training of the Real team and there we got the real players shouting, running and all that. And of course, we also used the recording of the original game.”

The ocean of voices surrounding Zidane is mind-blow-ing and a long way from the recordings you usually hear on a TV transmitted soccer game – the amount of detail is staggering. The film also has occasional subtitled thoughts from the soccer icon himself.

“When you are immersed in the game... You are never alone”, and quite a lot of these are actually about his sonic experience of the stadium.

SouNd SerieS: Part oNe

The ocean of voices surrounding Zidane is mind-blowing

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”When you step on to the field, you can hear and feel the presence of the crowd. There is sound. The sound of noise.”

In a film, when a character is listening, the audience is listening as well. Sound is usually not something we’re aware of but when we feel the main character focusing on the sound, the immediate, natural reaction is to do the same. And when we sharpen our sonic senses, it usually means sharpening all our senses – we become more aware and alert, and in a film like Zidane, which is based on atmos-phere instead of plot, this kind of awareness is mandatory in creating a hypnotic, mesmerising, immersive experience.

Doing this kind of abstract storytelling isn’t easy though, as Tom Johnson points out when talking about the mix of the film:

“The film really has no scenes to speak of – it’s really one 90 minute scene separated by a half time montage. In most films, you develop a scene and then move to the next one. The breaks allow one to move forward with a sort of con-ceptual sense of how the whole mix might be developing. In Zidane we had to develop the mix over 90 minutes, and this could easily take us days, if not weeks of work – we needed some kind of plan. Our first rough mix was kind of abstract, but not very interesting. To me there was no development; neither intellectually or emotionally.”

“The one thing we learned was that we really had to try a stick closely to the reality of the piece. The glue that would hold it all together would be making the football match itself feel as real and exciting as possible. If we could do

that, then perhaps we would find places to be abstract – and this would include ideas of where to introduce the music.”

The music does indeed play a key role in the film. Doug-las Gordon specifically requested the highly acclaimed Scottish post-rock band Mogwai to write the score and the atmospheric shifts and enormous dynamics of their music really shapes the film’s flow.

“Mogwai gave us 90 minutes of new music – we just had to decide where it should come in, what it should sound like, and when it should leave,” says Tom Johnson and goes on to praise the guitarist and producer Kevin Shields from My Bloody Valentine, who helped out during the mix.

“By the time Kevin came on, he could see that I was happy to play around with the music and so from there he really encouraged me to be more radical. There is a section where Zidane remembers his childhood. We tried to make the music feel like it was a memory, like a piece of music be-ing played by a neighbour in his boyhood neighbourhood.”

This sequence is one of the absolute highlights of the film – the stadium sound disappears and suddenly you hear kids playing, dogs barking and it feels like Zidane is becoming a child again, just having fun doing what he loves. It’s an emotional experience, entirely because of the playful sound design.

Tom Johnson concludes: “I think the important thing is to say, one shouldn’t be afraid of unexplainable things. If it seems to work, stand by it.”_

“when a character is listening,

the audience is listening as well”.

SouNd SerieS: Part oNe

Zidane, A 21st Century Portrait, douglas Gordon/Philippe Parreno, 2006

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PATRICIo GuZMána MuSeuM oF aMNeSia

WorDs ViBEKE BryLD * photos COUrTESy OF iCArUS FiLMS

This year at Thessaloniki Documentary Film Festival Patricio Guzmán was the guest of honour. And despite his physical absence he managed to make his presence felt. This led to a dialogue on the fundamental role of documentary and its relationship to memory, history and poetry.

tHeSSaloNiKi doCuMeNtary FilM FeStival: PatriCio GuZMáN

Nostalgia for the Light, Patricio Guzmán, 2010. Courtesy of icarus Films

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Guzmán’s work centres around Chile and its political development from Allende’s Chile in the 70s to the Chile of today, and thus very much around issues of

memory, history, traces of the past and collective conscious-ness. The Battle of Chile, Guzmán’s trilogy that depicts the election and subsequent coup d’état in Chile in 1973, was used as a starting point for a round-table seminar discussion about the current situation in Europe and in Greece in par-ticular. But as Guzmán remarked from the Skype screen, it is very difficult to export a unique experience:

“Despite the relentless attacks and financial pressure from the US on Chile and its population, the time of Allende was a time of true solidarity among the people. It was an unforget-table adventure that only happens once in a lifetime, maybe only once in a century.” This unique experience has left a mark on Guzmán’s career that can be seen in all his work.

The Battle of Chile depicts the events of ’73 as they un-fold, but since then memory and the retracing of history has played a central part in Guzmán’s work. So far only about 40 percent of the human rights violation cases in the aftermath of the coup d’état and Pinochet’s dictatorship in Chile have been tried in court. And due to its failure to settle accounts and deal with its own history, Guzmán regards Chile as a place steeped in amnesia. “Memory is vital, not academic. The discourse of women’s rights, gay rights, indigenous peo-ple’s rights have all become possible due to memory. People with memory fare better in education. As I see it, memory is as concrete as housing.”

The Greek audience and the young filmmakers are eager to learn from Guzmán’s experience as a filmmaker in the midst of the events culminating with the coup d’état in Chile. They are looking for tools to handle their current situation as citi-zens and as filmmakers.

Guzmán generously shares his experience from the mak-ing of Battle of Chile: “When people go out into the street, filmmakers need to do the same and make direct cinema. In Chile in ‘73 it was like a tennis match between government and trade unions (supported by U.S. officials), the action I was facing was amazing. But what you need to do is leave some space for the viewer to perceive things for themselves. Documentaries are first and foremost a space for contempla-tion. I made this film as a tribute, I was not objective, but I also gave my voice to the other side. That is what gives it a dialectic style. Documentaries have never been objective, the more subjective the better. An objective documentary is empty, like a camera filming a bank.”

When a young student in the audience refers to the fact that although many documentaries on the financial crisis are made, they don’t seem to provoke any action, and then goes on to ask whether we simply make documentaries to supply information or if he believes we can encourage people to act, Guzmán replies: “I think you’re right, we need to make documentaries, >

iN FoCuS: PatriCio GuZMáN

An objective documentary is empty, like a camera filming a bank

Q&A In your opinion, what is the role of documentary?Documentary filmmaking is almost always a method to counter information. it says things traditional media do not. it speaks in a clearer tone of the problem citizens have.at the same time, documentaries have an artistic side, it is a form of poetry and it seldom uses metaphors, allegories, it all depends on the subject. Documentaries are means for communication as well as expressions of cinematographic art.

In The Battle of Chile: How did you manage to turn live events into a coherent, fascinating narrative without losing the immediacy of those events? the most interesting thing about The Battle of Chile (besides the fact of having filmed it) is to articulate the true “history”. after having done a detailed written chronology of everything that happened, we discarded all the secondary events so that we could focus on the centre of the history during editing. But this selection had already been done during shooting as it was carried out with great selectivity, and above all taking advantage of the opponents’ fight going on in reality. the film “script” was a graph that occupied half a wall and that we elaborated before shooting.

if we would have shoot without a much defined perspective, we would have ended the film in three months (the row stock).

It seems traces of memory and physical traces are closely linked in your filmmaking – can you say a bit about the importance of traces and fragments in your storytelling? there is a type of documental archaeology. When we are presented with a territory, a city, a village, one begins to find the “prints” of memory everywhere: in the walls, in the old calendars hanging from the walls, in the way the steps in a stairway have been worn down, in the river banks.

In Nostalgia for the Light and other works, both you and the victims of Pinochet are quite literally on a mission to excavate history – can you talk a bit about your cinematic approach to this search for traces of history? in Nostalgia for the Light i wished to make a film about the matter of the body and the matter of the universe. this is why i looked for a place where everything there was [in the] historic past, like the desert of atacama; later i looked for astronomical observatories, and finally the human bones. >

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iN FoCuS: PatriCio GuZMáN

You consider memory as a concrete thing – can you elaborate on your use of this concrete material?memory is a thoroughly concrete concept. it is not a universal concept. there is better mood when there is memory. there are better ideas when there is memory. Better business is done when there is memory. tourism is better done when there is memory, etc. Just as “human rights” didn´t exist 50 years ago, “historic memory” arrived in our society to stay forever; “women rights”, “gender equality”, “ecology”, “indigenous people´s rights”, etc have arrived in the same way. it is not a trend.

Can you say a few words about the obligations of a documentary filmmaker when dealing with the material of memory? no artistic work can be done under the responsibility of “duty”.no poetry can be constructed mandatorily. i film a few things because i like them, and others because i feel indignity. i do it out of passion, not duty. _

IntervIeW ViBEKE BryLD

and they can certainly improve life and help solve concrete problems on water etc. But if they are poorly made, if they are boring, if they lack dramatics, they won’t work. Good inten-tions are not enough, you need to create characters, heroes, drama, emotions; simply showing mass graves to your audi-ence will result in you losing them. You need to start with the universe, with the galaxy, in order to start talking about the victims of Pinochet.”

And this is exactly what he does in Nostalgia for the light, where the vastness of the Atacama Desert, where relatives of Pinochet’s victims search for the remains of their loved ones is linked with the universal search for knowledge in the astro-nomical observatories located in the same desert. Thus physi-cal place, traces, memory and the frail individual are linked with the infinite universe. The sand of the desert, the human remains and atomic dust are connected in beautiful silhouette imagery filled with longing and a sense of loss. Loss through the remains swept away by the desert, loss of memory, and at the same time a sense of belonging.

Guzmán himself has expressed how longing for him is a very productive starting point for imagination and creativity, and works such as In the Name of God, 1987, and Madrid, 2002, are also highly invested with a sense of longing.

So despite – or maybe because of – Guzmán’s strong dedica-tion to tearing down the walls in, what he has referred to as ‘the museum of amnesia,’ poetry is key: “Documentary filmmaking is primarily poetic and teaching through documentary happens indirectly.”_

You need to start with the universe, with the galaxy in order to start talking about the victims of Pinochet

PatrICIo Guzmán Lozanes (born august 11, 1941) is a chilean documentary film director.

guzmán also teaches docu-mentary film classes in europe and latin america, and is the founder and director of theinternational Documentary festival of Santiago (fiDocS). he currently lives in france.

Nostalgia for the Light, Patricio Guzmán, 2010Courtesy of icarus Films

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Nostalgia for the Light, Patricio Guzmán, 2010Courtesy of icarus Films

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She gestured to the space between her legs and said: “This is where my family’s honor lays. This is where my ancestor’s honor lives. It’s crazy.” This was said by one

of India’s few female comediennes. The way she said it re-minded me of how I felt during and after many screenings I’ve had this year.

It’s a feeling I cannot ignore when it comes to highlighting some of the important documentaries I’ve encountered during the year. The seat of women in society, not just in Asian or Middle Eastern society, is a perpetual crisis of conscience that is reaching a new fervor. This compunction feels all-pervading but it has been the motor for some great documentary stories.

1 saLmaDirector kim longinotto, india 2013, 91 min.kim longinotto’s newest vérité feature documentary, Salma, centers on a female tamil poet of the same name. the region Salma is from in Southern india is enjoying a new-found affluence thanks to strong economic advances. yet it does not want to accept the inevitable so-cial progress and it is not uncommon for women to be locked indoors for most of their lives. Salma was no different, spending years almost underground without access to education, exercise or a social life, enduring a bitter marriage. During her imprisonment she began to write poetry, and like many great poets, she often had to memorize her words until pen and paper became available. When she escaped she got her work published and is now one of the most acclaimed writers in Southern india. much like the film itself, Salma’s poetry has the stride and sting of a boxer, with a sensuality that makes her work rival the writing of rabbindranath tagor. Salma echoes a character from a mani kaul film: it details the dual lives society forces us all to play. But these games mean life or death for women in india and many other parts of the world.

2 PussY rIot – a Punk PraYerDirectors mike lerner and maxim pozdorovkin, russia, uk, 2013, 90 min.longinotto’s film is essentially about power and this eternal struggle against power is again illustrated in mike lerner and maxim pozdorovkin’s much antici-pated Pussy Riot – A Punk Prayer. the acclaimed doc traces the stories of the three russian musician/artists who found themselves under arrest after singing an anti-putin refrain in one of the most revered churches in russia. the arrests made inter-national headlines leading to great demand for the film – from music festivals, human rights events, the usual mixed film festivals, and broadcasters – due to its phenomenal cross-audience appeal. the directors tell this much sought-after story with tenacity and economy, opening up the complexity of the characters who have risked so much to say what many of their generation feel. from the glass cage in which the pussy riots members are confined while in court, the accused behave impeccably as they decimate the prosecution’s argument with defi-ant logic, steely-eyed clarity and courage, and yet present such a dignified front in the midst of their predicament that they elevate the art of protest to great heights.

FavouriteS

The YeAR oF The ARTIsT doCuMenTARY

It seems that it’s the artists that are regularly teaching filmmakers how to use documentary

Hussain Currimbhoy, film programmer for Sheffield Doc/Fest, shares some of his favorite films from the last year of docs.

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3after tILLerDirectors martha Shane and lana Wilson, uSa, 2013, 85 min.What connects many of the best docs i have seen this year is a sense of dignity, which makes After Tiller such an important film for me. martha Shane and lana Wilson’s new feature deals with late-term abortion and meets the few remaining doctors who perform this highly conversational procedure. performing late-term abortions is a dangerous occupation since the murder of kansas abortionist Dr. george tiller five years ago by vigilante ‘pro-life’ supporters. While parents struggle to decide whether to have the procedure, the relationships between their doctors are pared down to their essence, revealing deep moral observations in their conversations. i respect this film immensely for its gentle approach, transforming the fear in both the doctors and patients into a realm of understanding for the audience. our opinions on what women do with their bodies vary and this will no doubt invite pin-drop Q&as at festivals this year.

4 PLot for PeaCeDirector carlos agulló/mandy Jacobson, South africa, 2013, 96 min.how we treat our fears is at the heart of a fascinating and timely film currently about to start doing the festival circuit. carlos agulló and mandy Jacobson’s Plot for Peace is a tight thriller-doc focusing on the mysterious lawyer, Jean-yves ollivier and the extraordinary political backroom wrangling she facilitated at the behest of the then french government to help free nelson mandela and end apartheid. feeling much like the lovechild of a Barbet Schroeder film and John gresham book, this is a new interpretation of the fall of apartheid, and is as riveting as it is razor sharp. much of the film is illustrated using never-before-seen archive materials to brilliant effect. this is made possible

through a new programme in South africa aimed at raising aware-ness of the treasures of their film archives. i certainly hope the archive is explored creatively by more filmmakers to give audiences further insights into the shadows of africa’s history.

5 CoraL: rekIndLInG Venus Director lynette Wallworth, australia, 2013.for something completely different, but just as enlightening, i must recommend lynette Wallworth’s doc-art-installation, Coral: Rekindling Venus. it is experienced lying down inside a tent, where a dome-shaped screen offers breathtaking images of the lives within the coral reef off australia’s coast, photographed by the rare light of venus. the immersive effect of the dome gives the watery colors a brilliant intensity and brings to life the beguiling dances of hundreds of little creatures that live on the coral. combined with a haunting soundtrack, it feels like you are living in a David attenborough dream illustrated by Salvador Dali. the piece is also accompanied by an augmented reality component that is visible with your phone using a specially designed app. it is encouraging to see that her work was funded through Screen australia. this is real cutting-edge use of the documentary form that will prove popular. it seems that it’s the artists that are regularly teaching filmmakers how to better use documentary and attract bigger audiences.

6 to Let tHe WorLd InDirector avjit mukul kishore, india, 2012, 93 min.artists and their stories are what make up To Let The World In by avjit mukul kishore from india. kishore’s feature is a series of interviews with some of india’s leading contemporary artists about their working practices, their philosophies and the state of play in contemporary indian art today. To Let The World In is a three- hour journey into the changing states of play in indian art, art production and perception, with characters whose wise and relaxed eloquence speaks volumes about india’s character as well as their own. kishore clearly has a rapport with his subjects that allows them to speak this way. the result is a wonderfully thought- provoking study of artists finding their paths. there are countless docs about the fine arts and their creators in china so i was genuinely excited to see a detailed account of the artists who represent that other potential superpower, india.

While last year was the year of the artist documentary, this could be the year of the protestor, the outsider, the agitator. If you are a programmer, a broadcaster or audience member, be prepared to meet the fringes of the world. That’s an exciting prospect because it is from the fringes that we understand the center better. _

FavouriteS

Hussain Currimbhoy Born in canada, raised in australia, and now based in the uk, hussain is Sheffield Doc/fest’s main programmer.

Pussy Riot – A Punk Prayer

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Austin, the hip capital of Texas. A cluster of skyscrap-ers marks the city center and from there it spreads out on a lower level and gradually merges with the

suburbs: houses painted in various bright colors, alternative garden décor, trailers. Once a year Austin transforms into a Mecca for creative individuals from the film, game and music industry for an intense week of screenings, showcases, events and panels during the South By Southwest Festival, popularly known as SXSW. More than a hundred thousand people are attending the festival.

One section of the festival program called ‘Digital Do-main’ is dedicated solely to new forms of interactive storytell-ing in films. From a documentary perspective the interactive genre is still pretty young, and the creative boundaries are open to whoever wants to take the challenge. Various forms of digital documentaries are presented: branched narratives, co-created works, data visualizations, works created to pro-voke activism, video archives, augmented reality experiences. Two of the people presenting are Caspar Sonnen, curator of

IDFA DocLab and Michel Reilhac, interactive developer, previously Executive Director of Arte France Cinéma, two men with an extensive overview of what has been going on for the last decade. We meet for a chat about where we are now, and where we are going in the future with interactive documentaries.

To begin with, I ask them to summarize the stage they think the industry is at with interactive storytelling. Sonnen opens the discussion by drawing a parallel to film history:

“I see a lot of things in interactive documentary that we saw before in the days when artists like Dziga Vertov were exploring what cinema could be. For instance, I see many projects about a specific place with many different charac-ters and fragmented little stories. In those projects, like for instance Highrise or Gaza/Sderot, the open concept of a place becomes the main character - not one single protagonist as we usually see in traditional television documentary drama. In such projects I see a direct link back to City Symphonies like Vertov’s Man With A Movie Camera. You feel the joy of invention in films like that and I think you feel the same joy in some of the interactive projects we see right now.”

Reilhac agrees and continues down the historical track:“We forget that when cinema was born it took a whole

generation for directors to appear, who understood >

The InTeRACTIve dAnCe FlooR

iNteraCtive SerieS: Part oNe: SXSW

Digital Domain at SXSW is dedicated solely to new forms of interactive storytelling on film. Suvi Andrea Helminen, an interactive filmmaker herself, looks at the challenges of this

relatively new storytelling form.

WorDs AnD photos SUVi ANDrEA HELMiNEN

50 years from now people will still watch Thanatorama because it is a timeless piece about deathCaspar Sonnen

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the specific language of cinema, for instance the treatment of time. It took over 20 years to understand that they didn’t need to show the whole trajectory of a character across a room, to understand that you could cut, and people could reconstruct what happens in between and to invent the time cut concept which we all take for granted in films now. It was a complete revolution, the invention of a completely new language. So the same thing needs to happen with transmedia, but in a way that we don’t know yet, because we are just beginners.”

Sonnen has seen an enormous growth within the interactive documentary field in the last five years. Even though we are beginners he thinks that some of the existing projects could already outlive their time. He mentions the early French webdoc Thanatorama as a candidate:

“50 years from now people will still watch it, because it is a timeless piece about death. Maybe they will say: ‘Ha ha, look how people were buried 50 years ago, when we still had space’, but it’s a perfect example of an interactive narrative which is very cinematic and that uses interaction to create a uniquely personal experience.”

After this thread of film history analogies, I remark that at the same time we’re forgetting that we have more than 40 years of narrative game design experience to draw from, and most filmmakers are trying to invent an interactive storytelling language from scratch. Sonnen responds:

“Good point. The mainstream game and film industry have evolved fairly separate from each other, but the internet and connected screens are rapidly bringing the two worlds together. That said, the most interesting things still seem to happen where the indie game world meets documentary and visual art.”

Moving on to the question of participation, I ask how to engage an audience in a genre which is still a pretty new niche. How do we transform an audience from passive and reflective, to actively engaged?

Sonnen sees it as one of the major challenges that interactive creators have to deal with:

“Linear narrative is in our DNA as human beings, it’s what makes us human. I am currently witnessing how my three-year-old daughter is going through a phase in which she constantly invents weird little stories using the people and objects around her. Parents don’t have to teach kids to tell stories; it’s a basic part of human development. Narrative

is how we make sense of the world - and that is why we all love to consume linear TV and cinema so much. It’s also why creating an interactive narrative is one of the hardest things to do well. Audiences are not used to or looking for these types of experiences.”

Reilhac defines what he thinks is the main difference from linear stories: “The main difference to me in interactive sto-rytelling is that there is a physical engagement, and having to actually do something. To use either your finger or your body to do something and that’s a big step: to change the nature of the engagement. It never happens by itself. The intention and motivation of the author have to be really clear because it will directly impact how you design the touch point between the story and the change in the audience’s behavior, to the point where the audience will be ready to take that first leap of faith. It’s like stepping on to a dance floor and starting to dance. Some people wait until 3 o’ clock in the morning when they are completely drunk, and they have wanted to go dance all night, but they didn’t have the guts to do it, because they didn’t want to look like fools. It is the same thing. For people to take a step into the arena of active participation in a story is very difficult.”

I ask them to tell me about their current favorite interac-tive documentary work. Reilhac starts: “The one that I’m re-ally touched by is Welcome to Pine Point about the ephemeral quality of one’s life. It had incredible poetic dimensions that I really connected with.”

Sonnen compares two of his favorite interactive documen-taries that were presented at last year’s IDFA DocLab: Alma, a tale of Violence and Bear 71 produced with funding from two of the main players in the field, ARTE and NFB. Alma, a Tale of Violence is about a woman telling the story of her past as a member of a brutal gang in Guatemala. During the film you can scroll up and down between two screens. Bear 71 follows the life story of a grizzly bear in Banff National Park in Canada and shows the clash between our world and the natural world. The viewer can navigate around on a map and switch freely between surveillance cameras in the park, but at the same time follow a structured linear narrative - the story of Bear 71.

“It’s interesting to compare them. Both projects moved me in a much more emotional way than interactive projects usually do. Alma presents us with a very condensed form of interaction. As a viewer, all you can do is use your finger to move between two screens. Some people say it’s so simple, is that really still interaction? Where Alma is simplified to the core of interaction, Bear 71 gives you much more open space

Michel reilhacCaspar Sonnen. Photo by Corinne de Korve

linear narrative is in our dnA as human beingsCaspar Sonnen

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with all the risks that follow. That you can feel lost or over-whelmed. However, for me, when I started exploring Bear 71, the story and all the fragmented videos and pictures on the map quickly became one. When it happens, this narrative serendipity effect is very powerful. When I stumbled upon the webcam area, I was really moved. I saw the tenderness of some lady, somewhere in the world, who I couldn’t speak to or interact with. Suddenly you understand this story is not ‘just’ about a bear, but about all of us.”

Our conversation ended here, so we managed to talk about the past and the present, but we didn’t get to the future.

The next day I hear an interesting perspective during the panel presentation of my own interactive documentary 48 Hour Games, a multiple choice narrative about the creative process of making video games. During the Q&A, a guy in the audience makes the following remark: “What if in the future we could take this even further, so we no longer need a mouse to choose a path when the story branches out, but start making documentaries that just react to your eye movements?”

This comment could be a plausible prediction. Today most interactive films react to conscious choices with a mouse click or a finger swipe, but maybe one day we will no longer need this. We could create interactive experiences that react to your mere presence as an audience, where the interactions are no longer conscious and the user interfaces are natural. For ex-ample using biofeedback, where the film responds to bodily reactions from the viewer, which are picked up by measuring devices and fed into a computer: heart rate, brainwaves, eye tracking etc. The first technology to take this step is already here. In this scenario the audience will no longer have con-trol or agency in the experience unless they choose to. They won’t even have to step onto the dance floor. The audience can lean back and watch and the film will respond to them anyway. Then again if that happens, maybe we won’t call it interactive storytelling any more. Maybe we will call it adap-tive storytelling. _

useful definiTions

• Interaction: mutual or reciprocal action or influence.• Transmedia storytelling: telling a single story or

story experience across multiple platforms and formats.• Augmented Reality (AR): an enhanced version of

reality created by the use of technology to overlay digi-tal information on an image of something being viewed through a device (such as a smartphone camera).

links to the interactive docs mentioned

highrise.nfb.cagaza-sderot.arte.tvthanatorama.com pinepoint.nfb.caalma.arte.tv bear71.nfb.ca48hourgames.com

Welcome to the Pine Point, Michael Simons and Paul Shoebridge, 2011. Courtesy of Natioanal Film Board of Canada

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on May 22nd 2013, the 200th anniversary of the birth of the German composer, the notion of a “total work of art” became reality thanks to the producer

Christian Beetz of Gebrueder Beetz Filmproduktion, he chose Wagner as the subject of an episode in his series The Culture Files, a documentary format that explores the un-solved mysteries of European cultural icons in the context and style of a modern day TV crime drama. It also features the lives and deaths of Pier Paolo Pasolini, Zarah Leander, Heinrich von Kleist and Ludwig van Beethoven.

The Wagner File is first and foremost a docudrama co-produced with SWR/ARTE, directed by filmmaker Ralf Pleger and starring Samuel Finzi and Pegah Ferydoni as Richard Wagner and his second wife, Cosima. But the pro-ject was also developed as a crossmedia event, which was presented on April 23rd in Nyon, at Visions du Réel. Beetz showcased the 90-minute film and Wagner File – The App which is funded by Medienboard Berlin-Brandenburg, Me-dia and MDM and designed for iPad and iPhone. It features archive documents and pictures, interviews and audio re-

the WAgner fILes: A CROSSMEDIA GESAMTKUNSTWERK?

WorDs NiCOLò GALLiO * photos FALCO SELiGEr

Would Richard Wagner, had he lived today, have considered crossmedia collaboration as a means of exploring and elaborating on his furious and epic music?

Nicoló Gallio visited Visions du Reel, where the files were presented.

viSioNS du réel: tHe WaGNer FileS

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cordings, all of which provide a more immersive exploration of Wagner’s world. An extraordinary highlight is the “mu-sic machine” created by American music animator Stephen Malinowski, who has worked for artists such as Björk; he transforms the overture to The Flying Dutchman note by note into animated circles, lines and squares.

In addition to that, Knesebeck Publishing House is due to release a graphic novel written by Andreas Völlinger and illustrated by Flavia Scuderi.

The film’s structure displays a multilayered approach in its exploration of the life of the composer. According to Beetz: “The aim of the project is to reach a wide audience across the different media, focusing on young people: it will be broadcast on TV and distributed in the education sector.” So the objective was to find someone who could create a style attractive to younger audiences yet underpinned by a deep analysis of Wagner’s work, which would be provided by international experts. The solution was found in a di-rector with a vast and concrete knowledge of classical mu-sic: Ralf Pleger, a German filmmaker born in 1967, with

a background in Musicology, whose previous works fused together glossy style, vibrant editing and a clear understand-ing of the role that classical music plays in films.

The documentary reflects the layering of linguistic codes; it’s a hybrid film, mixing docudrama and detective con-ventions, interspersed with the animated sequences of art-ist Flavia Scuderi and enriched with digital maps and split screens. The dynamics between Richard and Cosima are intercut with some powerful scenes that combine Wagner’s crescendos with epic camerawork that ascends up and over the Swiss peaks.

If the acted sequences are set in a sort of post-World War II limbo, reminiscent of the classic Hollywood melodrama, the investigation scenes take place in a modern multimedia lab, a real investigation room in which historians, biogra-phers and musicians, such as Simone Young (Wagner con-ductor and music director of the Hamburg Opera), Philippe Jordan (Wagner conductor and music director of the Paris Opera) and Oliver Hilmes (author of the bestselling biogra-phy on Cosima), dissect Wagner’s opus and his larger than life persona: a renowned composer but also a controversial character. According to leading experts who have studied his life, without his art, he would have been defined today as “a small-time criminal”, “a crude anti-Semite” and a “cross-dresser”. >

viSioNS du réel: tHe WaGNer FileS

Without his art Wagner would have been defined today as ”a small time criminal”, ”a crude anti-semite” and a “cross-dresser”.

The Wagner Files, ralf Pleger, 2013. Courtesy of Falco Seliger

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To add depth to an already complex set of material, which took two years of production and one year of shooting, Ple-ger avoided simply producing re-enactments of Wagner’s past: “I wanted to stage the scenes like fictional interpreta-tions of the facts and not to pretend that they were the facts themselves,” explains the director “I opted for a different look, like those melodramatic films from the 1950s/1960s Hollywood. We tell a story about scandal, focusing on the investigation room because a stronger reference to modern crime scene procedures is something that, nowadays, every-body understands and is familiar with.”

Although he knew Wagner’s music, from having studied his work, Pleger approached the project by reading biogra-phies and diving into real sources: Cosima’s biography and Wagner’s letters in particular. He tried to get into the minds of the couple, delving deep into their emotions, studying their behaviour and using their own words to write their dialogues in the fiction.

“In the documentary we have two levels,” says Pleger. “The first one is related to the facts according to the experts and includes the female narrator, whose voice is provided by the actress Regina Lemnitz. There is no speculation here. The second one is created with the scenes with the actors: this is an interpretation, more artificial than conventional re-enactments, because it is based on the codes of melodra-mas, which weren’t natural at all.”

Consequently, Finzi and Ferydoni’s constantly overacted and stressed performances are alternated with more scientif-ic reconstructions, animations and digital inserts that break the narrative flow of the burning emotional exchanges be-tween Richard and Cosima and result in the climatic finale.

The Wagner Files was shaped as a collective effort that brought together creative people from different fields. Beetz knew how to find the creative balance because he had al-ready been involved in large scale crossmedia events such as Farewell Comrades! Interactive, the fall of the Soviet Empire as told by the people who experienced it. This project took three years to be developed and consisted of a TV series, web format and a book. His production company had been

viSioNS du réel: tHe WaGNer FileS

Broadcasters are focused on people of about 60 years old and want to have total control on the projects, but they still think about them in terms of traditional slots. on the other side, the Arthouse market looks at the 55 and over range. so how do we reach younger audiences?

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the Wagner file can be found at: http://www.gebrueder-beetz.de/en/productions/the-wagner-file-tv

involved in more than 100 documentary films for the na-tional and international markets since 2000, winning the Grimme-Award for Farewell Comrades! and receiving an Oscar Nomination for Best Documentary Short for Open Heart directed by Kief Davidson. However, he felt that his role was shifting from traditional film producer to content producer, and now has a clear understanding of how the whole process has changed through four steps: content – audience – storytelling – media.

“The tough part of the development, aside from financing, is to find the right team and to convince filmmakers, game designers and web developers to work together,” says Beetz. “I strongly believe that collaborations and partnerships are the key to developing complex projects, but there’s a need to change approach. Broadcasters are focused on people of about 60 years old and want to have total control on the projects, but they still think about them in terms of tradi-tional slots. On the other side, the Arthouse market looks at the 55 and over range. So how do we reach younger audi-ences? The educational market has a huge need of contents, but we need emotional ways to attract people and engage them, and we also have to face new production challenges, such as finding a price for the web-based side of these pro-jects – and public funds for them as well, just like the ones already in place for the film industry. It is a learning-by-doing process, but we need to go that way.”_

POLISH DOCS ARE AVAILABLE ONLINE AT:

WWW.KRAKOWFILMFESTIVAL.PL

/PL/INDUSTRY/VIDEOLIBRARY

// ACCESS REQUESTS:

MARTA.SWIATEK@KFF.COM.PL

Window To

The World Of Polish

Documentary Filmwww.polishdocs.pl

The Wagner Files, ralf Pleger, 2013. Courtesy of Falco Seliger

viSioNS du réel: tHe WaGNer FileS

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sATA photos SOPHiE WiNqViST

PHoto SerieS

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Still photography project in Havana, Cuba in 2002“When i wanted to figure out if i was a photographer i bought an old Hasselblad and went to live in Havana for 5 months. What hit me was the evident, proud way in which women wore wasp-striped hot pants. in an afro-Caribbean culture free from ads and porn i was met by a monumental sensual self-esteem. it was far from the grey zones in analytical café-conversations on Södermalm, Stockholm. My Cuban female friends knew what they wanted and they could not be stepped on. then my picture craving arose.”

PHoto SerieS

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We all know there is a thin line between reality and fiction. Some filmmakers at the International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR), happily exploit

this idea and combine the two, turning reality into fiction, or showing the fiction of reality. Karaoke Girl by Visra Vichit Vadakan combines the two in quite a straightforward way. Penumbra by Eduardo Villanueva is advertised as a documen-tary by the festival, looks like fiction, and is something in between. Dead Body Welcome by Kees Brienen is a fiction of sorts, but looks like a documentary. And Kern by Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala shows that documentary and fiction merge seamlessly, and might indeed be inseparable.

The IFFR is known for its preference for innovative films from young filmmakers. In terms of documentaries this is nothing different, as it shows many films that mix fiction and documentary conventions and investigate the outer edges of the genre, though it doesn’t shy away from proper auteur docs too. So how do docs negotiate the divide between docu-mentary and fiction?

Karaoke Girl quite straightforwardly mixes documentary scenes with fictionalized ones. The film is about Sa, who came to Bangkok from rural Thailand to earn money for her family when she was only fifteen. She worked in a factory, but then decided that working in a bar and as an escort would make more money. The film shows her current life and her family’s situation in documentary scenes. Her father talks about the family’s unfortunate circumstances and the need for Sa to help provide. Sa’s childhood memories as well as more recent memories and her contemporary dreams – those elements which cannot be visualized in a purely documen-tary way – are visualized through fictional scenes in which Sa plays herself, based on a script the filmmaker wrote after spending some time with her. An important line is the one about a promising client who takes her places and shows her his affection, until he meets an acquaintance and betrays her. They meet again, spend the night together, and he leaves her money, betraying her again. Mr. Right is obviously waiting somewhere else. In the meantime, Sa dreams of being a sing-er, and the film ends with her staged performance. The com-bination of fiction and documentary works well, the scenes relate to each other in a natural way.

Penumbra is another film in which the protagonist plays himself, or at least partially. It’s a film about an elderly cou-ple, living in a remote area in Mexico. Adelelmo Jimenez is a hunter, Dolores takes care of the home, and of him. Their son

is dead. Villanueva silently observes them, as they go about their daily routines and rituals. According to the festival cata-logue, this is a documentary, but it doesn’t feel like one. For instance, in hunting scenes, the bird he shoots comes falling from the sky; and when he hunts a deer, he shoots it, fol-lows the blood trail, and finds it neatly lying there, while the camera is looking down on it. Also, Adelelmo is filmed from a bird’s-eye view while walking through the forest, displaying visual awareness and pre-mediation. The editing reinforces this: when his wife Dolores walks to an altar in their house and lights a candle, the camera has been waiting for her. Both walk in and out of the frame frequently, which emphasizes the presence of the camera on-site, anticipating the protago-nists’ actions. In dialogues, everything that is being said is relevant – and all this suggests a script. Although there is no music in the film, the sounds, especially those in the forest, such as birdsong and water running, seem accentuated rather than completely natural. Adelelmo and Dolores play them-selves in a fictional narrative.

Also playing his fictionalized self is Kees Brienen in Dead Body Welcome, which tells the fictionalized true story of the filmmaker, who once agreed to meet his friend in Ghana to watch a solar eclipse, and upon arrival found that his friend had died. Brienen decided to tell this story, but at the same time honour his friend. He waited for the next solar eclipse to pass over India, and found a beautiful spot in Sikkim to serve as a fitting location. He then filmed his own arrival, his encounter with the remains of his friend, a ritual the locals perform for the latter, and the transportation of the body to the Ganges – where it was burnt in the open, in accordance with Indian tradition. The story is introduced in review, with the – not very original – text “This is what happened” and Brienen performing a monologue in a hotel room, a highly journalistic performative act in which he addresses his de-ceased friend, while the camera takes on a surveillance role. Both act and point of view set the documentary tone. This tone is reinforced by the following shots of Indian traffic, the chaos, the noise, filmed from inside a car, and shots of Brienen walking the crowded streets, filmed close-up with a hand-held camera.

WorDs WiLLEMiEN SANDErS

Some films invite us to think about documentary performances by definition: don’t all participants somehow construct their presentation of self?

eXPloitiNG tHe tHiN liNe

iNterNatioNal FilM FeStival rotterdaM

... according to the festival catalogue, this is a documentary, but it doesn’t feel like one

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The film has a very observational style, but as in Penum-bra, the camera sometimes takes self-conscious positions: like when it is “awaiting” the caravan transporting the friend’s body further downhill on its way to the Ganges River; or when it’s filming Brienen and his driver from the top of a building while they walk the street. Nonetheless, thanks to the delicate balance between Brienen’s presence and a con-temporary observation of India, its beauty and its ugliness, the film feels like documentary rather than fiction.

Another example: Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala conceived a documentary about Peter Kern, the highly ca-pricious Austrian enfant terrible filmmaker, in which they thought they could have Kern create the ending. But they soon found that Kern cannot be directed. So while the film starts off as what appears to be a proper documentary, with the filmmakers asking questions off-screen, observing Kern, and sometimes appearing on-screen by accident, it turns into Kern performing himself in the second part, and this in turn reframes the first part. The crucial scene occurs after some 80 minutes, when Kern has moved from his tiny housing project apartment to a new place. Fiala arrives there, and tells Kern that they hadn’t finished filming in the old place yet, so could they please put the furnishings back and return to shoot some additional footage? Kern rages, calling the film-makers amateurs: “… I’ll never set foot in that flat again and that’s that! ... ” Falia pushes: “We have to finish filming this movie. There is no way around it.” Kern rages on, then “Cut!”, smiles, and a hug: “That was fantastic!” Authenticity cracks and falls apart. From then on, it is clear that Kern is performing, will be performing, and probably has been per-forming all along. Although the film flaunts its construction throughout, beginning with the opening question addressed to Kern: “Peter, what sort of film are we making about you?” and including the directing of the domestic, what is at stake

here is not the authenticity of the footage itself, but the au-thenticity of the protagonist; the construction of the film is clear from the start, but now it appears that the presence of Kern was an act. This invites us to think about documentary performances by definition: don’t all participants somehow construct their presentation of self? Don’t they all consider what to show and tell, and what not to? However you feel about this, Kern’s performance brings the doc closer to what is sometimes regarded as pure fiction: the deliberate and pos-sibly prepared and rehearsed presentation of a character.

What these films reveal in their rich exploitation of fiction and documentary conventions is that the two are inseparable in the end, that both rely in the same techniques, and that any participant performs. Stories are how we communicate about the world, and narratives that do not hide their construction seem actually more transparent and sincere than those that strictly adhere to documentary conventions of unmediated access to other people’s worlds._

penumbradirector eduardo villanueva, Mexico, 2013, 89 min.

dead body welcomedirector Kees Brienen, Netherlands, 2013, 80 min., www.deproductie.nl

Kerndirectors veronika Franz, Severin Fiala, austria, 2012, 97 min., www.ulrichseidl.com

sao KaraoKe (KaraoKe girl)director visra vichit vadakan, thailand, 2013, 74 min., www.hiddenroosterfilms.com

iNterNatioNal FilM FeStival rotterdaM FeStival

Karaoke Girl, visra vichit-vadakan, 2013

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Hot doCS 20.tH aNNiverSary: Part 1

everybody loves a success story and there are few that can match that of Toronto’s – and latterly, the international documentary community’s – love affair with Hot Docs.

Now celebrating its 20th anniversary, Hot Docs is second only to TIFF (Toronto International Film Festival) as the most popular cinema event in Canada. Further, like TIFF, Hot Docs can rightfully claim status as the leading film festival of its kind in North America; certainly both are in the upper echelon of events in the United States and Canada.

When Hot Docs was conceived in 1992 by Paul Jay, then chair of the Canadian Independent Film Caucus (now DOC, the Documentary Organization of Canada), it was not an easy idea to sell, even to his own board of fellow documentary filmmakers. In fact, the board voted down his motion to create a Canadian documentary festival 11 to 1. But the one, Mr. Jay, wasn’t dissuaded.

“I was sure that a documentary festival would make

us money,” recalls Jay. “Nothing could change my mind. I approached Debbie Nightingale (then the head of TIFF’s Trade Forum) and asked her if she’d be willing to work with me on it – for no money, until we could raise some.”

Nightingale saw the potential in Jay’s vision. “Documentary and Canada are synonymous in my mind. Paul was the dreamer and I was the practical one, which made us a good team.” Nightingale, who now runs her own suc-cessful production company, was an expert on logistics. She knew how to raise money, which meant her salary was even-tually paid, but there was little money left to hire staff except for technical and administrative people for the festival itself.

It cAn’t be DoneTHE BIRTH OF HOT DOCS

WorDs MArC GLASSMAN * photo HOT DOCS

Marc Glassman, editor of POV, was part of Hot Docs at the beginning 20 years ago. In commemoration of the festivals 20.th anniversary he gives a historical perspective

on the first half of the festival’s life.

The board voted down Paul Jays motion to create a Canadian documentary festival 11 to 1

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Hot doCS 20.tH aNNiverSary: Part 1

The overall budget for the first Hot Docs was $100,000; now it’s $6,265,000 (with $1 million being in-kind services).

Jay and Nightingale created a competitive festival for Canadian documentaries, to be capped off with a high profile awards dinner. That initial year was the “purest,” according to Nightingale, because it was “a documentary festival for, by, and about documentary filmmakers.” Nightingale had successfully created committees across the country to vote on all competitive categories and handled the creation of a massive set of rules and regulations.

While Jay initially intended the festival as a money making exercise for the Caucus and its lobbying activities for inde-pendent documentary directors across Canada, he quickly realised that there could be a grander vision for the festival.

Take the name, Hot Docs, which was funny and revolutionary at the time.

“It was edgy,” recalls Jay. “We wanted something that wasn’t staid and dry and academic. It embodied the idea that docs could be vibrant, sexy and popular. You shouldn’t feel like you were taking medicine when you saw a docu-mentary! Any well made doc is exciting because the film-making is excellent. Just like any other movie.”

It takes confidence to create a festival and Jay certainly had it – in spades. In order to attract media interest and international attention for Hot Docs, he invited British filmmaker Nick Broomfield, then one of the few documen-tarians whose features played commercially in cinemas, to premiere his latest film Aileen Wuornos: The Selling of a Serial Killer in Canada as the Opening Night event. It sold out and the buzz from that evening sizzled throughout that first festival, which took place in February, 1993.

A sense of drama always animated Jay, who has directed the award-winning documentary Hitman Hart: Wrestling with Shadows, produced a sensationally successful TV current events show counterSpin and is now the CEO and Senior Editor of The Real News, a radical Internet service. That sense of occasion was with him during the first Awards ceremony.

“The Toronto International Film Festival was already es-tablished,“ recalls Jay, of the period in the spring of 1992, when he began to work on Hot Docs. “Everyone said that another festival wouldn’t make any money. Early on, Debbie and I went to Kodak and requested $10,000 to do a feasibility study to find out if that was the case. We used $2000 to conduct the survey and write a report on it and $8000 to feed the festival. We never considered that the report would be negative. We were committed to creating the festival.

“A couple of months before the first festival, we got the report. I looked at the conclusion, didn’t tell anybody about it and put it on the shelf. At the totally successful first Hot Docs gala, in front of 600 people – the whole documentary community across the country including broadcasters and funders – I announced the results of the feasibility study. It said that the festival couldn’t be done!”

Hot Docs continued to build on its formula for the next four years. The committee system, which involved having filmmakers, broadcasters and critics vote on Canadian documentaries in a large number of technical and artistic categories worked well, driving up interest in the films in the months leading up to each festival. A select number of high profile international documentaries were screened every year. By the time Barbara Kopple came in 1998 to present the Canadian premiere of Wild Man Blues, her film on Woody Allen, Hot Docs had begun to attract the atten-tion of the documentary industry internationally.

But by 1998, it was also clear that Hot Docs couldn’t continue as a division of the Canadian Independent Film Caucus. “I’m the one who engineered the split between Hot Docs and the Caucus,” says Jay. “The intent was never to de-crease the Caucus’ profile in the festival. It was done to free up the Caucus to lobby broadcasters and the government [for benefits and opportunities] for documentary filmmakers without worrying whether the same organizations were giving money to Hot Docs or not. And it left Hot Docs to pursue its own path. Debbie and I left at the right time. But we had built a foundation by that point.”

1999 was the year that Chris McDonald took on the role of Executive Director. Debbie Nightingale stayed for a final year, as Festival Director, while Hot Docs began to transition into more of a global event. New programming initiatives included a curated International programme, a national survey (the first was France) and a retrospective of the films by a Lifetime Achievement recipient (in this case, Albert Maysles.)

Screenings were held in Toronto’s Little Italy, with cafes replacing hotel conference rooms as the festival’s small-er venues. The main public events took place at the now defunct Uptown Theatre and Little Italy’s Royal Cinema. 69 films screened to 7000 people that year; in 2013, 180,000 attendees saw 204 films. The festival had begun to change – but there was still a long way to go. _

The second part of Hot Docs’ life will be in the next issue.

The results of the feasibility study said that the festival couldn’t be done

The overall budget for the first hot docs was $100,000; now it’s $6,265,000

Festival programme, 1997

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Hot doCS: CaSe Study

WorDs ViBEKE BryLD

In more ways than one, Forest of the Dancing Spirits stood out from the rest at Hot Docs this year. Director Linda Västrik shared the incredible tale of how the film ended up

being 13 years in the making.

one sonG And 13 YeARs lATeR

Forest of the Dancing Spirits, linda västrik, 2013

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Hot Docs: case stuDy

13 years ago Linda Västrik heard a song that brought her to a rainforest in The Republic of Congo. Here she met the Aka people and their mythological

gods, the dancing spirits. Despite the enchanting mythology and the often exoticised people of the deep forest, the film’s gaze on the Akas (more popularly known as pygmies) is nei-ther romantic nor anthropological. Rather the film is based on identification and intimacy. And like all good tales, it’s both specific and universal.

The film is set in an isolated camp in a Congolese forest about 15 days walk from the nearest airport. The village and thus the lifestyle of the Akas are threatened with extinction by the gradual expansion of international tree logging com-panies, but this is on the fringe of a story about love, faith, and community.

The film beautifully ties together the story of Akaya’s struggle to have a child and save her relationship, with an in-timate portrait of a tight-knit community and its mythology of the creation – or rather discovery – of the world. As one of the elderly women overbearingly explains to the director: “Linda, there is so much you don’t know.”

When Linda first travelled to Congo in 2000, she was 26 and the country was in the midst of a brutal civil war. I ask her what prompted her to travel to meet the Akas.

“I had just finished my last film and couldn’t find any mo-tivation to start a new project. Then, by accident, I heard this song and it felt like, when you’re a child and your mother’s hug makes you feel like everything will be ok. So, I had a sense that the people who made this music knew something about life and I had to meet them. “

But the travel directions for the Aka village weren’t exactly readily available and Linda had to look through the only available maps, she could find; colonial aerial maps of the 900,000 hectare forest from the 1940s. She comments: “If mapping were better and more updated there would be much less corruption in the use of land and resources.” Through her research and contact with former missionaries, she managed to work out where to travel; thus began a long, complicated and dangerous journey.

“Bribes are the most common way of getting things done, and I wanted to travel and work without using bribes, both because bribes attract assholes and it makes you a target of violence. As a white woman in central Africa you’re already exposed, so if word gets out that you’re prone to giving bribes and carry around cash, you will never get rid of gangsters.”

She travelled through Cameroon, where she went through a long process in order to get the necessary permits to travel to her destination. At the prime minister’s office she created chaos by refusing to pay bribes and thus bringing the queue to a halt. The people behind her got more and more upset, but she didn’t budge. In the end the prime minister himself asked to speak to her. She explained to him that she didn’t want to use bribery because she felt it undermined democ-racy and she loved his country too much to do that. He was bewildered by this peculiar young woman, but moved by

her concern for his country. Not only did he grant her the permission she needed, he also put her in contact with the head of his private military. The colonel is in charge of all road blocks and security, and, despite his reputation for being brutal, he was so happy that Linda wanted to go live with the Akas that he sent her on her way with his personal blessing and protection. So she ended up travelling through the country and the various roadblocks with a letter stating that anyone giving her any trouble would have to deal with the head of the prime minister’s private military. This naturally turned out to be a great advantage. But that’s the short version: In order to prepare herself for the trip ahead she also spent time with the military and the police, joining them on training sessions and making friends with them in the process.

The unorthodox nature of travelling around Central Africa without engaging in bribery is evidenced by the fact that Linda got a lot of hassle from, amongst others, war photographers and National Geographic for disturbing the system.

Linda Västrik’s story in many ways turns our idea of good and bad upside down. She ended up receiving a lot of help from people traditionally cast as ‘villains’ – such as the military and the logging companies – and witnessed a lot of corrup-tion on the part of organisations such as WWF and National Geographic. She explains: “The photographers from National Geographic were very angry at me because I refused to pay bribes and that made their lives more difficult. And I was really upset by this because they were my heroes and I was hoping to work for them one day.”

Five months later she was in the jungle. Her reputation preceded her and the logging companies were ready to throw her out. But when they saw her impressive collection of papers: the letter from the head of the Cameroon military, the ministry of forest/health/sience and culture, the immigration office and the police/gendamerie/sectret police and local police they let her stay. And in the end, they were the ones who helped her out and assisted her with vital information and everyday practicalities. They kept her cash, they paid her bills and they lent her their phones. They gave her information on health and security risks – outbreaks of Ebola and violence.

When Linda got off the bus at the last piece of road, she met an Aka man, who took her to his camp. “He called me his ‘white elephant mother’ and led me by the hand. I was in tears after the long journey and overwhelmed by his kindness.”

The following year she stayed in the village with the Akas, getting to know them and learning the basics of their language. “One of first nights I put up my tent by the river. When I woke up in the morning everyone was standing around the tent, curious to see if I survived. It turned out, I had placed my tent right where the crocodiles used to camp.”

This is, of course, an incredibly naïve approach to the jungle, but Linda’s naivety is a part of the magic and charm of the film. It is obvious she is not telling her story from a comfortable, safe position, but trying to navigate as she goes along. And this creates an intimacy between the Akas and herself and thus between them and us. In one scene, where the children have their teeth filed to a point in accordance with their custom, they mock her for her square teeth and lack of family. They say to the child: “Do you want to be alone and with square teeth like Linda?” >

I wanted to travel and work without using bribes, both because bribes attract assholes and it makes you a target of violence.

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Hot Docs: case stuDy

During the first year, she didn’t shoot a single thing, and it was only thanks to an arts grant from the Stiftelsen Framti-dans Kultur (The Foundation for the Culture of the Future) that she was able to finance the trip. The next time she re-turned was in 2005, with development support from SVT and SFI. She brought a sound recordist, a S16-mm ARRI camera and rolls. Yes, she shot everything on film. Partly because mechanical devices are more reliable in the jungle, and partly because she wanted to make a more beautiful film

than those normally seen on National Geographic. Besides her sound engineer, she ended up with a crew of between two and 60 members, all Aka, who worked with navigating and carrying 2 tons of equipment.

After the first shoot it became clear to her that she was in over her head. She joined forces with EyeSteel, who helped her to finance the project and gave her moral and logistic sup-port: “A film like this needs so much flexibility, so you have to work with someone, you really trust. After all they have to be prepared to get you out if you get stuck in the jungle.”

Linda Västrik was really in love with the Aka women’s myths, but this didn’t sit well with the commissioning edi-tors: “My main interest was the mythology, but the financiers didn’t want an anthropological, feminist film, so we tried to push the myths aside. But in the edit we realised we needed them.”

And indeed, the myth of discovery, and of men, women, and love run through the forest and intertwine with the dra-ma of life; the fundamental desire to have children and to be loved. It is both a beautiful and a clever choice to let the wis-dom of old tales be told together with present day needs and wants. With Forest of the Dancing Spirits, Västrik has managed to make a film that immediately strikes a familiar chord in the viewer and allows us to identify with the Akas. And to the man in the audience who was annoyed that she didn’t clarify how small they are: Please, we’ve had enough of that. _

Director Linda Västrik

Forest of the Dancing Spirits, Linda Västrik, 2013

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History and memory haunt us. There is no way to escape, only to repress. The past is always a work in progress into the present. To better live the pre-

sent, it is crucial to understand the past. The trauma of recent Chinese history remains a subject of repression today. From the Anti-Rightist Movement to the Cultural Revolution, and later the Tiananmen Event of 1989, the very force that caused all this suffering governs the construction of histori-cal narrative – and also access to archival materials. However, this history is still the living memory of many Chinese people today. The concern of many Chinese intellectuals has become how to preserve these repressed private memories, and how to access history through the perspectives of individuals.

I will examine the role of Chinese independent documen-tary in restoring the repressed past and the dynamic relation-ship between past and present, individual and nation – by analyzing Hu Jie’s two oral history films: Searching for Lin Zhao’s Soul (2004) and Though I am Gone (2006). They are both devoted to the victims of the Anti-Rightist Movement and the Cultural Revolution.

The New Chinese Documentary Movement emerged in the historical, political, and social context of the 1980s and 1990s. It rebels against the established political ideologies in China. The prevalence of affordable digital cameras facilitated the burgeoning of individualized documentary making. In the context of the New Chinese Documentary Movement, >

essay

The TruTh of hIsToryaLternatiVe arcHiVes

New Chinese Documentary challenges the power over what will be known about the past. Its focus is on the

repressed history of individuals.

WORDS Yuqian Yan * PHOtOS courtesY of icarus films

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digital technology is most importantly used to gain better ac-cess to the repressed truth and to challenge the hegemonic representation of “history” and “reality” in mainstream me-dia. It gives ordinary people the means to capture and pre-serve the lives and memories that are missing or distorted in the official rhetoric. Independent Chinese documentaries record what people are unable to see or are forced to forget.

However the contradiction between the democratic na-ture of digital technology and the strict governmental con-trol over the circulation and distribution of moving images makes the liberating power of digital technology a utopia in China. Due to the marginalized status of Chinese independ-ent documentary and its restricted domestic circulation, it is difficult, if not impossible, to have any direct and immediate impact on society.

In the book The New Chinese Documentary Movement: For the Public Record, authors Chris Berry and Lisa Rofel use the term “alternative archive” to indicate the value of Chinese in-dependent documentaries today. These documentaries might not be able to reach their intended audience or change peo-ple’s perception of history immediately; the hope is that they will be kept as historical evidence for the future.

Nanjing-based documentary filmmaker Hu Jie used to work for the official Xin Hua News Agency before he quit the job in 1999. Like many other independent filmmakers in China, Hu Jie was trained as a painter with no profes-sional background in filmmaking. But his heightened con-cern about repressed history and social injustice urged him to pick up the camera in order to both represent and excavate the debris of history. To a certain extent, Hu Jie’s documenta-ries can be seen as historical archives in themselves, showing the entangled concerns surrounding legal issues, power rela-tions, memory functions and technology. His films not only preserve the traces and living memories about the victims of historical trauma, but also delineate the broader social and political environment of that historical period through the life stories of its victims. He gathers subjective accounts and evidence, and then compiles them with emphasis on discon-tinuity, gaps and historical specifics, posing the question of “what is it possible to talk about?” By rendering historical weight to repressed individuals, Hu Jie challenges official his-tory and provides his own account of historical reality.

In Searching for Lin Zhao’s Soul, Hu Jie deliberately in-cludes his own voice or image, turning the documentary into a personal journey. At the beginning of the film, Hu stands in front of the camera, saying:

“Four years ago, I heard a story about a female student from Beijing University who wrote a lot of impassioned and humanistic poems with her blood at Tilanqiao Prison in Shanghai and was then executed. This girl was called Lin Zhao. It was the first time I heard this name. After the An-ti-Rightist Movement of 1957, the entire Mainland China stopped thinking and lived in the midst of lies and horrors. It was this girl who started to think independently … This story made me decide to give up my job to look for the lost soul of Lin Zhao.”

The story of Lin Zhao and the life of Hu are intertwined. Thirty-one years after Lin Zhao’s death in 1968, Hu was shocked not only by the striking story itself, but also by his insufficient knowledge of that period. Making this documen-tary cost Hu Jie his job at the state news agency. It is this

repression that makes the alternative archive crucial to the understanding of history.

Freedom is always based on knowing where the taboos are, what can be remembered and what should be forgotten. It is not surprising that at first most people refused to talk about Lin Zhao in the film’s interviews – since this is the memory they were trying to escape and forget, both voluntarily and as mandated by the state. As survivors of a traumatic history, this past is not only too painful to remember but also dis-turbs the peaceful present. They are aware that to speak up in the documentary is to align themselves with the marginalized alternative, to have their memory recorded and archived as opposition to the authority. For Hu Jie, the spirit of Lin Zhao is an independent thinker who expressed her critical thoughts even under the most difficult conditions. His research on Lin Zhao’s story discovers the repressed potential for change.

Another person who holds out hope for change is the main character in Hu Jie’s Though I am Gone – the 85-year-old scholar Wang Jingyao, who worked for the Social Science Research Institute. Wang’s wife Bian Zhongyun was the vice principal of the Girl’s Middle School attached to Beijing Nor-mal University. She was beaten to death by her students at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution. Wang carefully record-ed and collected every detail of her tragic death; the photo-graphs of her dead body, her bloodstained clothes, the watch that stopped at the moment of her death, and even her hair. In the same way that Hu Jie painstakingly put the fragmented memory and story of Lin Zhao together, Wang obsessively captured and kept traces of his beloved wife, and guards these archival materials not only as his personal memory and lived experience, but also as evidence of historical truth that should be shown to the public in the future. As Wang firmly states in the film, “this is a tragedy of my family, but it is by no means simply a personal case. If I don’t tell the truth of history, I would be ashamed of not doing my duty.” Instead of letting the past fade away like most people, Wang chooses to linger in the painful memory which would otherwise be buried un-der the debris of history. Wang’s archiving-to-documentary process reflect Hu Jie’s own documentary making as a process that shares the same spirit of independent thinking.

An archive is closely bonded to power at the very moment of its birth. It is essential to ask: Who has the power to guard what? How does it relate to the public? What is the reason for and consequence of inclusion and exclusion? To what extent do archives wield power over truth and authenticity? The confrontation between an official and alternative archive is ultimately a contest for power, the power of knowledge production, the power to control what will be known about the past. Both Searching for Lin Zhao’s Soul and Though I am Gone are saturated with the tension between the official and alternative archive around the issues of historical knowledge, accessibility and guardianship, authenticity and objectivity.

What Lin Zhao, Wang Jiangyao and Hu Jie also have in common is their marginality – caused by their refusal to con-form and compromise to the authority. Lin Zhao refused to

Believe in history for one day people will talk about today’s suffering. I hope to be able to tell people in the future of this pain.Lin Zhao

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engage in self-criticism even when all her peers did so, and she insisted that it was the entire country rather than she who had gone mad. In her blood-written poems and articles, she firmly refuses to become “the slave of the tyranny.” As she wrote: “The vulture is eating your heart; the iron chain is confining your body. But your soul is freer than wind. Your will is stronger than rocks.” The writings that expressed her dissident voice were kept as evidence of her criminal behav-ior, with no public access. All traces of her story have been eliminated from the national historiology. In the same way, Wang Jingyao used his Seagull camera in his struggle against the authority and society.

Moved by Lin and Wang, Hu Jie says: “Because the Chi-nese authority does not want us to remember the history, we non-official people should remember on our own.” Hu’s documentaries and Chinese independent documentary in general, embrace perspectives from the margins of society and public knowledge, and strive to build an archive for the repressed history of individuals.

Archives are not always available to the public, and their accessibility largely determines the circulation of the memory embodied in them. The difficulty of accessing the official ar-chives of Lin Zhao is mentioned several times in Searching for Lin Zhao’s Soul. They are still kept secret from the pub-lic through the power of private curation. The documentary does not tell us how Hu Jie eventually got to these archives or how he finally persuaded his interviewees to speak freely in front of the camera.

The tension between confidential archive and public knowledge is very palpable. In an interview with the Chi-nese Sunshine TV station, Hu reveals that Lin Zhao deliber-ately kept her blood letters and poems in the prison so that they could survive and be archived as part of her “criminal records.” However, the poems and letters she asked people to take out of the prison all disappeared: “The severe social envi-ronment at the time forced people to destroy these documen-tations, which would otherwise become part of their “crimi-nal records.” Only the state archive had the right to preserve them. In the film, we see that a poem Lin Zhao wrote to her friend on the back of her photo was crossed out. Letters from her were missing and memories about her faded away. It is these missing pieces about her life, the discontinuity and gaps caused by suppression that attracted Hu, making him think about who has the right to preserve what. Lin Zhao’s strategic use of the official archive indicates her belief in a new interpretation of her thoughts in a different historical context; that her pain and suffering will be told to people in the future and that her “criminal records” will eventually be turned into the “criminal records” of the autocratic regime she was fighting against.

In Though I am Gone, Wang’s materials kept after his wife’s death are not only the media through which he accesses the past and indulges in grief – but also his aspiration for the future. At the beginning of the film, when the director asks him about the psychological trauma he experienced while taking pictures of his wife’s body, Wang replies: “I had a clear mind at the moment, that is, to keep the record of history.” Indeed he sees himself as an archivist, collecting the “crimi-nal records” of historical atrocity. Like Lin Zhao, he wishes to restore justice for his wife and millions of other victims. However, in spite of his eagerness to make his archive public,

its accessibility is rather limited, and he has to place his hope in an imagined Cultural Revolution Museum of the future.

Independent Chinese documentary itself, whose accessibility and circulation is not controlled by its creator, is “supervised” by the authority. The alternative documentary is trapped in power relations, constantly challenging and being chal-lenged by the authority. The writing of modern history, as the prerogative of the state, banishes subjective storytelling and eliminates the dangers of otherness. It disguises the frag-mentation and incoherence of history with a fictional linear, progressive timeline.

Hu Jie’s intentional use of archival footage of the Anti-Rightist Movement and the Cultural Revolution in both films can be interpreted as a critique of this petrified historiology. The cheerful and heroic tone in the official footage sounds comfortably ironic when juxtaposed with the heartrending stories of Lin Zhao and Bian Zhongyu, since it was precisely these “celebrated events” that engendered such tragedies.

The interview is the primary method applied by Hu to tell the story of Lin Zhao and Wang’s wife Bian Zhongyun. The recording of testimony turns their private remembrance into a visual archive of people recollecting their memory. The past should not be viewed as static and separated from the present; rather it is always in dialectical dialogue with the pre-sent. What people thought and said about Lin Zhao at the moment of today’s recording may be vastly different to what they might have said ten or twenty years ago. The content of interviews also tells us the story of a person through their facial expressions, tone and mood. Pity, fear, anger, melan-choly, all these deep and complex feelings are missing in the standardized official footage. History is not petrified in the dusty archives; it is alive in people’s memory and lived experi-ence today.

Lin Zhao’s ‘vilification’ of the Communist Party and her dream of a democratic society were actually very insightful – she was one of very few people who remained clear-headed. Wang Jingyao lives in a time in which a whole society is try-ing to forget its past. He is not simply addicted to the trau-matic past but firmly holds onto his dream for the future. So the alternative archive is also a site for potential change, stored with hope._

This article was first printed in the Norwegian film magazine WUXIA.

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courtesy of icarus Films

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Sundance is now in its 29th year. There’s more corporate sponsorship than in the old days and tons more swag. But amidst the celebrity gifting suites, something re-

mains the same – the commitment to independent voices, es-pecially in the documentary programme which continues to take on critical global, ecological, and humanitarian concerns.

A cluster of documentaries this year addressed timely United States political and economic issues. I will focus on three: The World According to Dick Cheney by R.J. Cutler and Greg Finton, Inequality for All by Jacob Kornbluth, and 99% – The Occupy Wall Street Collaborative Film, which lists nine co-directors and nearly 100 collaborators behind founders Audrey Ewell and Aaron Aites.

R.J. Cutler, co-director of The World According to Dick Cheney, was last at Sundance with The September Issue, about fashion magazine Vogue. Several colleagues wondered if an

overtly political filmmaker would have been given the same access Cutler had to the man who wielded unprecedented power as Vice President under George W. Bush. Cutler had four days of sit-down time with Cheney, and the doc is built around the interview.

For people who don’t know who Cheney is, or don’t know that it was Cheney (not President Bush) at the helm after the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and Penta-gon, or didn’t know that a Vice President could be so set on taking the United States to war, you might learn something. For those who are exasperated this man who swore to defend the Constitution held such seeming disregard for the separa-tion of powers, and the Justice Department, and the Geneva Conventions, you may become frustrated and even outraged.

One audience member walked out during a post-screen-ing Q&A after challenging the filmmakers about how they

WORDS Harriette YaHr * PHOtO courtesY of sHowtime

We are drawing a line through three films from Sundance this year: politics, economics, and the Occupy Movement.

sunDance FiLm FestiVaL

DocumenTs from The u.s.

The World According to Dick Cheney, r. J. cutler, 2013. courtesy of sHoWtime

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let Cheney off the hook, not even pressing any follow-up questions when the former Vice President, the audience member said, ought to be standing trial for treason. At least he ought to have to answer to the financial troubles the U.S. finds itself in due to the enormous cost of wars that continue to drag us down.

But, that’s just an opinion. Cheney defends his convic-tions without pause, from weapons of mass destruction in Iraq to waterboarding and warrantless wiretapping. Cheney’s talking head interviews are balanced by experts who of-fer counterpoint, but nothing terribly radical. And Cutler throws softballs to Cheney, never digging up any dirt, espe-cially regarding Halliburton (the contractor Cheney has ties to), an omission which leaves an indelible mark on the film. After accusations in the public sphere that Cheney profits from the war, the filmmakers don’t even raise the question, if even to offer an opportunity for refutation. For this and other significant absences, I am left concerned someone might treat this film as a pedagogic document.

But Cutler does let Cheney speak. And perhaps this is the point, to let Cheney’s character surface. We are left with a man who, if he had the chance to do everything over, would do it all again. Cheney stands firm in his belief that he kept his country safe, and that’s all that matters.

Next in our focus is Inequality for All, directed by Jacon Kornbluth and featuring Robert Reich, former Secretary of Labor under President Bill Clinton. This tour-de-force crash course in How the Middle Class Is Getting Screwed provides insight not only into income disparity and the struggles of everyday Americans, but also into Reich himself who, at 4’ 11’ (1.49 m), invites us into his personal world with a mix of unexpected vulnerability, humor, and passion that props Inequality up with a depth of heart rarely found in a film about economics.

But it’s not just economics, and that’s the point. You feel Reich’s concern reverberate though his standing-room-only classroom and off the screen. Reich cares deeply that people are hurting, families are hurting, good decent hard-working people are hurting. He wants you to understand why. And he wants you to feel like there’s still hope to turn it all around and go back to the America that once was.

Dubbed “An Inconvenient Truth for the economy,” the 85-minute doc is a pulpit for Reich’s long-standing income inequality narrative (most recently trumpeted in his book Af-tershock) and is structured around lectures from Reich’s uber-popular Wealth and Poverty course at the University of Cali-fornia, Berkeley. Lecture snippets are lively and interactive and the doc clips along too. Engaging graphics offer a picture of the financial desperation playing out across the nation.

The facts are hard to run from, unless you’re of the per-suasion that poor people just don’t try hard enough: Income inequality hasn’t been this bad since the Great Depression, middle class wages are stagnant in the face of inflation, the likelihood of someone working their way out of poverty is stacked against them, corporate interests influence public policy and tax rates for the wealthy promote this mess.

Hope is located in Reich’s compelling plea to anyone will-ing to listen: from factory workers to Occupy protestors; from his students to us, the viewers (in fiery non-lecture hall close-ups that pepper the film). Can we muster the will, and the political will, to fix the system? Reich’s closing speech ends with the reminder that “Politics is not out there. Politics is in here.”

Drawing a line from The World According to Dick Cheney to Inequality for All, the last focus is 99% – The Occupy Wall Street Collaborative Film. Wherein Dick Cheney offered up the idea of power and corrupting politics, and Inequality laid out the complex affair of politics, the economy, corporate power and domestic policy, 99% takes to the streets. This energizing doc tells the story of Occupy Wall Street, sometimes called Occupy or OWS, a protest against income inequality (and more) that began in New York City on September 17, 2011, and grew into a nationwide movement. 99% inspires you to get up out of your seat and take action.

My big note on this film is the way it was made. The pro-duction process mirrors the complexity, subversiveness – and challenges – of the Occupy movement. Just as the movement throws down the gauntlet to the structure of corporate and governmental hierarchy, the doc eschews traditional hierar-chy, incorporating nearly 100 filmmaker collaborators from all over the U.S. under the helm of four directors and six co-directors. With energy ripping off the screen, protests from urban centers like Boston and Oakland to small towns in be-tween unify to tell a “we’re mad as hell and don’t want to take it anymore” story.

Critics might say 99% lacks a clear narrative, maybe even that the message was unfocused, but I don’t agree. In fact, wasn’t that the same criticism thrust on the movement? Di-verse calls for change bellowed from the streets: holding big banks accountable, eliminating money from politics and overturning Citizens United, increasing taxes on the wealthy, ending the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and more. It was hard to encapsulate the message into a soundbite, that was part of the point. Filmmakers were wise to include thought-ful perspectives such as Naomi Wolf ’s dictum that if Occupy is to have lasting impact, it needs to consider its methods and it needs a leader.

Here, the production process offers a window into success-ful outcomes. 99% co-founder and co-director Audry Ewell says the greatest technical challenge was simply organization, including things like setting up naming protocols, making sure they were being followed and sending drives to the right location for footage to be downloaded. But, ultimately, they had everything under control. “We honestly didn’t have a lot of tech issues because we worked with our post-production supervisor, colorist, and supervising editor in the very earliest stages to set up strict protocols that kept things organized and consistent. We basically skipped pre-production and focused on post-production at the very start.”

So maybe it’s good to focus on the end game and incorpo-rate proven strategies to create success. There’s a lot to learn from the Occupy Movement, a work-in-progress we’ve not heard the last of. That ordinary Americans took to the streets to stand up to inequality in such a profound way is remark-able. 99% is a witness to that, and it’s a testament to the pos-sibility of change._

... a depth of heart rarely found in a film about economics

sunDance FiLm FestiVaL

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robert Reich provides an impassioned lesson about the economy and the widening income gap in Jacob Kornbluth’s Inequality for All. Reich’s political and

public service career spans decades and includes positions in the Ford and Carter administrations. He was Secretary of Labor under President Bill Clinton. Reich is the author of numerous articles and books including the best-sellers The Work of Nations and Aftershock: The Next Economy and America’s Future. A former professor at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, Reich is currently Chancellor’s Professor of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley.

You’ve been communicating these issues for a long time, now you’ve chosen to make a film. What’s the power of the documentary form to you?Since this is the first one that I’ve ever hosted, its difficult to say. We’ll find out. My sense from other powerful documentaries is they can reach people in ways that other media can’t. I’ve written 14 books, I spend a lot of time on radio and television, and yet I have a sense that people – particularly young people – are best reached through videos, films, documentaries. Very few people buy books any longer, we’ve seen an erosion of readership, yet people still go to the movies and are increasingly getting video on demand. One of my sons, who is 28, after seeing a screening of Inequality for All said, “Dad I’ve watched you and read your stuff ever since I can remember, but this is the first time I’ve ever understood what you’ve been saying.”

The film cites examples from Europe in countries where people have a better chance of pulling themselves out of poverty than in the United States. Can you talk about this difference?Europe invests substantially in education, job training, and skill development for all of its young people, it brings almost everyone up to a high minimum level of competence. Europe is also more unionized than the United States so workers have more bargaining leverage. Most European nations have a more progressive tax structure than the United States does. Put them all together and you find that in Europe, it’s relatively easier for someone born into poverty to escape poverty. In the United States, it has become harder. 44 percent of children born into poverty in the US are still in poverty as adults, that’s higher than anywhere in Europe.

When you saw Europe making decisions to implement austerity measures, what did you think?Austerity economics, I believe, will prove to be a terrible mistake. Britain, Spain and other nations that did not begin with severe budget problems, should never have regarded their budget deficits as their largest economic challenges. They are now beginning to pay the price. In Greece, the deficit really was significantly out

of control. Another documentary at Sundance about Dick Cheney made me think about the enormous debt and burden that’s been created by the wars, and how that has affected the middle class.What we attempt to do in the film is connect the dots.The enor-mous costs of the wars the United States has undertaken have driven up the budget deficit, at the same time that we had a very deep recession – and at the very same time the highest tax rates on the wealthy were dropped considerably under George W. Bush. It’s an impossible combination.

So what’s the way out? Is it getting money out of politics and investing in infrastructure and education?Those are part of it. We also need to unionize those sectors of the economy that are sheltered from international competition and not really affected by technology. For example big box retail chains like Walmart and fast food chains like McDonald’s and many other places where low-wage workers really have no bargaining power at all. Only 6.6 percent of private sector workers in the United States are in unions.

I just don’t see any way things will turn around without getting money out of politics. Am I being naive?I think that has to be one of the first priorities, the overwhelming dominance of big money in politics makes it almost impossible to get anything done that is not in the interests of big money.

Do you remain hopeful the middle class will be able to turn this corner?Of course. You have only to look at history. The unique and remarkable thing about the United States is its capacity to put ideology aside and get on with what needs to be done – when Americans understand the nature of the problem. We’re very pragmatic people, the problem is we often don’t understand that we’ve got a problem, until quite late in the game. As Winston Churchill once said, “You can always trust Americans to do the right thing after they’ve exhausted all other alternatives.”_

Pragmatic peopleAn interview with Robert Reich from the documentary Inequality for All

WORDS Harriette YaHr * PHOtO courtesY of sHowtime

sunDance FiLm FestiVaL

robert reich

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Tealdi and Gonzàles receive the award in recognition of their work to develop and nurture the foundations for a professional documentary community in the south of europe.

Based in turin stefano tealdi was in 1997 one of the driving forces behind the yearly documentary networking and pitching event Documentary in europe, wich for many years took place in the city of Bardonecchia. the event quickly became a meeting point for the italian and international documentary sector and a focal point for a blooming documentary scene in turin. Based in Barcelona, Joan Gonzàles was, also in 1997, one of the initiators of the DocsBarcelona pitching session. in 2007 the initiative grew by adding a documentary film festival to the event. the eDn award is presented to stefano tealdi and Joan Gonzàles not only for initiating Documentary in europe and DocsBarcelona (they did so in challenging circum-stances) but they have also managed to have each of their initiatives staying relevant, adapting them to a shift-ing production environment and kept them run.

We are happy to announce that Paul Pauwels has accepted the appointment as director of EDN. Paul Pauwels comes from his position as Managing Director for the Belgium production company

Congoo bvba, and has a long track record of working with international documen-tary co-productions from both a commis-sioning and production point of view. In connection with his appointment EDN, Director Paul Pauwels states:”When I was invited to become the director of EDN it didn’t take me long to make the decision to accept. It is with great enthusiasm that I prepare myself to start the new task that awaits me. I consider it a privilege that I am now in the position to put the experience of almost thirty years of working as a pro-ducer at the service of an association that is very close to my heart. Some decades ago, a rather limited group of European

documentary professionals gathered in Marseille, answering to the obvious need to create an instrument that would defend the documentary community’s interests and to create a well-working network that would allow its members to share knowledge and information. Starting from zero, the constantly grow-ing group of members, dedicated board members and a very motivated team over the years have managed to build EDN into a solid instrument with an impres-sive track record. It’s only fair that today I honour these efforts and I feel honoured that I have been chosen to continue that great work; to lead EDN and to defend the members’ interests.”

WInner of The eDn aWarD 2013: steFano teaLDi anD Joan GonZàLes

a welcome often involves a farewell as well – also in this case. on behalf of eDn i want to give a big thanks to Hanne skjødt, who stepped down as eDn Director earlier this year, a position she held from January 2011. Prior to this, Hanne served for 4 years as eDn network manager. eDn owes Hanne a lot for her huge contribution to the development of the organization.

We know that this goes as well for a lot of the documentary professionals around the world who have met and worked with Hanne throughout the years – not least due to the many, many warm greetings we and Hanne received when her resignation was announced. thank you Hanne – and good luck.

mikael opstrup, Head of studies

The AcT of Killing Joshua oppenheimer, Denmark, norway, united Kingdom, 2012, 120 minSTorieS We Tell sarah Polley, canada, 2012, 108 minforeST of The DAncing SpiriTS Linda Västrik, congo, sweden, canada, 2013, 104 mincuTie AnD The Boxer Zachary Heinzerling, usa, 2012, 81 minBelleville BABy mia engberg, sweden, 2013, 76 minrenT A fAmily Kaspar astrup schröder, Denmark, 2012, 80 minlA mAiSon De lA rADio nicolas Philibert, France, Japan, 2012, 103 minTchoupiToulAS Bill ross, turner ross, usa, 2012, 80 minThe lAST STATion cristian soto, catalina Vergara, chile, 2012, 90 min

eDitors PicKs 9 Docs you neeD To see

eDn neWs

From tHe eDn team: Thank you hanne

neW Director oF eDn: Paul PauWels

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Las Hurdes: Tierra Sin Pan is a film by Luis Buñuel from 1933. During its half-hour duration, the people liv-ing in a remote mountainous region in Spain are portrayed as extremely poor, purportedly neglected and abandoned by the rest of the country, if not the rest of Europe. Seeing it as a student years ago, I remember that I found it puzzling in many ways. The tone of the film was rather strange and today you can read on Wikipe-dia that the film “…is in fact an early parody of the barely invented genre of documentary filmmaking.”I was thinking of it the other day, because I found myself watching a group of people living in a mountain-ous region in Greece, portrayed as extremely poor, and purportedly ne-glected and abandoned by the rest of Greece, if not the rest of Europe.To The Wolf by Aran Hughes and Christina Koutsospyrou (both are credited as director, cinematographer and editor) shows us an environment untouched by sunlight – metaphori-cally or otherwise. A goat shepherd, Giorgios, and his parents plus an-other older shepherd, Paxnis, and his wife are the main characters in this film, where the sky is always grey and where power lines scar the (presuma-bly) beautiful landscape. The opening of the film is a monologue by Paxnis. He tells us that Greece is dying and that people are stealing and we kind

of get the idea that the financial cri-sis is to blame on for the misery of the region – which we as spectators of course are inclined to believe and frown upon.The film’s images are bound to make you breathless; less so the slow editing pace, but that’s okay. The characters look picturesquely weather-beaten, and everything seems to be going well from my perspective. But after a while,I began to suspect that the monologue in the beginning is what the film has set out to prove. That there is absolutely no hope; poverty and starvation will prevail. And they do.That could be a problem from a dra-matic point of view if you’re into plot development. But what I find even worse is the impression I got that the film is actually doing the characters a disservice by depicting them like this – as victims of external calamities and an unseen enemy. It’s as though we don’t get to know them as people. Who are they really? What do they like? What kinds of activities make them proud and content? I find this to be a recurrent mistake of many so-cially aware documentaries because, to put it bluntly: are victims interest-ing – in an engaging way? Will I proffer my sympathy to people who show no interest in anything, not even each other?So maybe the film holds an imma-nent and somewhat naïve perception

of the portrayal as redeeming in itself by sheer force of imagery and scenery. As if the poor souls will benefit from being portrayed in this way?I felt like a jerk for thinking this, and then tried to acknowledge the al-legorical theme, which is somewhat more rewarding if not totally com-prehensible. On the film’s website, it is described as “… both the reality and an unsettling allegory of today’s Greece”. The film does contain some traits of very, very subtle humor, but there are a lot of bad moods around; the young people are leaving (no, they already left) and no one seems to care much about anything except money, food, drinks and cigarettes. Love of nature, culture, each other, one’s trade – anything – is almost completely absent in the film. If this is an alle-gory of Greece, then

¹ to them!

So the overall problem for me isn’t the aestheticizing of poverty but rather that this bleakness takes you nowhere. A tragic perspective never seems to suggest a way out, and hence we risk letting down the subjects of the film because we as spectators are left to feel pity rather than sympathy.And then it happened that I suddenly came to think of that old Buñuel-film. What he did was to utilize a centuries – old Spanish “tradition” of viewing the inhabitants of Las Hurdes as a group of generally underdeveloped people. But he did so in a somewhat surrealist and satirical manner (which of course escaped most people - even film students to this day) to change the direction of the way we normally perceive other people and incidents. If that is the great idea behind To the Wolf then I will tip my hat – but un-fortunately this doesn’t quite seem to be the case._ ¹ Good night and good luckInternational Premiere: Berlinale ForumWORDS mikkel stolt

ARE VICTIMS INTERESTING? Premiere Berlinale: forum: To The WolfDirector aran Hughes and christina Koutsospyrou, Greece, 2013, 74 min.

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I began to suspect that the monologue in the beginning is what the film has set out to prove.

To the Wolf, 2013, aran Hughes and christina Koutsospyrov

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The Spirit of ’45, Ken Loach’s new documentary, looks back at the period that followed the end of the WWII in the UK, when the Labor Party won the elections and implemented their social democratic program. The film links past and present and invites the young generation to reflect upon their own ideals by looking at the dreams that inspired the post-war period. Socialism is nowadays a term too often associated with the opposite of de-mocracy. But after the war, socialism meant something else. It meant dis-mantling a pre-war economic system ran by the rich in favor of the rich. The new government secured housing for the poor, established a free universal health care system and nationalized some of the key industries.

The film is a mix of archive footage and recent testimonies. The images are black and white and often it is difficult to distinguish whether the people filmed are part of the archive footage or not. Maybe the blur between past and present is intentional but that is nevertheless confusing. Beginning with the generous ideas of the post-war era that brought in the welfare state in the United Kingdom, and moving on through the Thatcher

period and its liberalization, the film points at how a society governed by the market logic disadvantages the majority of the people. The storyline punctually follows his-torical moments and the most im-portant decisions taken in each pe-riod. The interviewees in the film are common people, doctors, nurses and trade unionist who witnessed the pre-war period as children and lived most of their lives in the post-war period followed by the Thatcher government. Contrasted with their personal testi-monies, the archive footage that backs their stories feels impersonal at times. There is something bitter-sweet about the interviewees, something in their appearance and their words. They have a certain dignity and flair re-minding of the past. Their stories are lively and they tell them with pride and humor. The viewer will feel the consistency of their words, coming not from simply telling a story but from having lived that story.These personal narratives bring the past closer. Without them, the film would be just a flat historical narrative. It is the personal memories of the in-terviewees what gives a real human dimension to those times. One of them recalls life when their family had to pay for every doctor’s visit and sometimes could not afford it. Another one recalls how risky mining

life was when coal was more impor-tant than the lives of the people. And they all vividly remember how things changed for the better after the war, for example the excitement of having a house with a bathroom and a garden.Everything changed when Margaret Thatcher came to power. The eco-nomic measures her government took were meant to make the British economy more competitive and those measures brought a lot of uncertainty. The rule of the market that came to govern economy did not serve the working class but quite the opposite. The generation of ’45 witnessed the step by step deconstruction of the welfare state created after the war. Within this new frame, many of the social needs that were not reflected in the market demand have been left unanswered. However, the portrayal of the Thatcher period is rather one sided. The film explains too briefly the reasons for those economic measures. That serves the message of the film but not the viewer’s understanding of that period. To a large extend The Spirit of ’45 puts modern Britain into perspective and it is a gentle reminder of the impor-tant steps that lead to the problems Britain is facing today. Still, under-standing what was lost but also what was gained during the Thatcher pe-riod is essential. Otherwise the line of argument is reduced to a plain feeling of nostalgia for the post-war period and an emotional disapproval of what came after. The film ends with a short footage of the street celebrations at the end of WWII. For the first time throughout the film, the images are in color. They inspire happiness, liveliness and opti-mism. This ending in color links the past to the present and gives a strong feeling that those people in 1945 and their dreams were real and not too far in the past. They are the images of people at the end of many difficult years, which now look towards a new life ahead of them. The ending is a plea for nowadays young generation. It is a plea to take charge, learn and find inspiration in the dreams that defined the spirit of ’45._

International Premiere: Berlinale Special

WORDS Bianca-olivia nita

There is something bitter-sweet about the interviewees.

rehaBIlITaTInG socIalIsm film: The SpiriT of ’45 Director Ken Loach, uK, 2013, 98 min.

courtesy of BBc

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Alma is a very poignant web docu-mentary on the confession by a Guatemalan woman who escaped a “mara” (a criminal gang in Guatema-la City) and paid a very high price for it. She tells her moving and violent sto-ry, facing us, sitting in what – we will understand at the very end – turns out to be a wheelchair, against a neu-tral, black backdrop. As she talks and does her best to hold back her tears, the bottom part of another screen appears at intervals above her head. It is up to the viewer to drag this new screen down to watch contextual im-ages and video footage that illustrate what Alma is talking about. You can go back and forth between the “bot-tom screen” of her speaking and the “top screen” of illustrative material.And that in itself is the main prob-lem with this otherwise deeply in-volving project. Alma tells us her sto-ry in a very honest, straightforward way. Tears flow. She tries to redeem herself for the terrible things she did while she was in her “pandilla”. In every way, what we are called upon to witness as a spectator is the emo-tional confession of someone who has suffered and inflicted a lot of suf-

fering, and is paying a high price for her mistakes. It is a painful process for Alma and she bears it with great dignity. But the movement of the finger back and forth, dragging be-tween both screens up and down the iPad, creates a constant disruption in the focus and respect we should have for what Alma is saying to us from the depths of her pain.This very simple movement, creating interaction between the two layers of the story, actually defeats the very purpose of it: as Alma pours her soul out to us, the very least we should do is listen and watch in a respect-ful way. Instead, I found the device forcing me to go back and forth be-tween her and the enriched content. It trivialized the whole experience for me and made me feel uncomfortable for wanting to watch the suggested videos above her, while at the same time wanting to go back to her and watch her, be with her. This yoyo ef-fect is a contradiction in the film’s own terms. For this reason, Alma, with its dis-turbing and incredibly powerful subject and character, is to me an example of what not to do in inter-active storytelling: it is a perfect case

of the interaction getting in the way of a story that is so intense and com-pelling that you hate the distracting playing around that it encourages you to do. I also did not understand the rea-son for the illustrative videos above Alma; there were lots of different added videos at the side that taught me the full context of Alma’s situa-tion - with no sound, in a very dry, teachery way it has to be said, while the music soundtrack accompanying the upper screen images tended to contradict the dry nature of this ad-ditional content, adding an unpleas-ant feeling of casualness to the ter-rible nature of what is being shown to us. Alma delivers a powerful viewing experience because of the content of the story this complex woman tells us and the way she delivers it. I do not see how anyone could remain unmoved by Alma’s sad life and her courage in reconstructing herself now. The film raises the issues of forgiveness, the possibility to redeem oneself for terrible mistakes, the dif-ficulty of escaping one’s doomed en-vironment. For this, Alma is a must see and the directors should be com-mended for their choice.

But to me, creating an immersive storytelling experience for the viewer calls for much more organic reasons to suggest interaction. What does the flip screen device add to Alma? Not only does it add nothing, but it delivers an unwelcome distraction. There is nothing organic about the attempted participatory dimension of the film. I much prefer the idea of a classical linear version of the film in which I am compelled to sit, watch and listen to this incredible woman, with the appropriate levels of focus and respect owed to such an honest endeavor. Interactive storytelling only makes sense as added value to the user’s ex-perience when it seems to come from within the very nature of the story told, enhancing it in an organic way. And only then._ WORDS micHel reilHac

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onscreen conFessioninteractive iPad documentarY: AlmA – A TAle of violenceDirector miguel Dewever-Plana and isabelle Fougère, France, 2012, 60 mins.

The film raises the issues of forgiveness, the possibility to redeem oneself

courtesy of miguel Dewever-Plana

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“Attention projectionists! Adjust the lens so that your picture will be focused properly before the show starts”, booms the voiceover in the opening sequence of the UFO [Uni-dentified Flying Object] conspiracy theory documentary, Mirage Men. This neat piece of voiceover sets the agenda for the rest of the film, which attempts to shift the focus of UFO and conspiracy theory discourse.

Mirage Men is not interested in proving or indeed, disproving the existence of extra-terrestrials. Rather, it seeks to look at how we come to know the things that we know about alien conspiracy theories, questioning the often disqui-eting origins of the UFO’s infiltration into the popular culture of today.Beginning with the flying saucer re-ports that sparked the Roswell UFO incident of the late forties, Mirage Men highlights the importance of the Robertson Panel, a scientific body commissioned by the US Central Intelligence Agency. The film details how The Robertson Panel encouraged the US government to take great pains to debunk such stories, and to monitor individual civilians who expressed an interest in UFOs with increasing intensity. Contrasting Invasion of the Body Snatchers-esque black and white archive footage with the beauti-fully photographed dusty mountain and desert views of present-day New Mexico, Mirage Men brings a genre steeped in fifties nostalgia up to date. A collaborative effort from directors John Lundberg, Roland Denning

and Kypros Kyprianou, the film is an adaptation of Mark Pilkington’s book Mirage Men: A Journey into Disin-formation, Paranoia and UFOs: The Weird Truth Behind UFOs (2010). Looking specifically at the culture of disinformation perpetuated by the US Government in the eighties and nineties, Mirage Men promises to ex-pose how the government “created a myth that took over the world”.The film centres on the figure of US Special Air Force agent Richard Doty, a man so convincing in his perpetu-ation of this disinformation that he drove UFO enthusiast and PHD physicist Paul Bennewitz to his mental demise. Bennewitz, whose investigations eventually resulted in his admittance to a psychiatric ward, is a notorious figure in the UFO community. Ben-newitz famously discovered ‘Dulce Base’, reporting UFO sightings that he had in fact confused with the activ-ities of a secret military base. Threat-ened by his intimate knowledge and photographic evidence of covert military activity, the government’s counterintel-ligence forces took things into their own hands and began to feed Benne-witz disinformation, further fuelling his fantastical claims. This disinfor-mation went as far as to allow Ben-newitz to form a fully fledged theory, a theory that suggested that he had discovered a secret underground alien facility in Dulce, New Mexico (Dulce Base).Doty, one of the film’s main talking heads, states that while approximately 80% of the information circulated about UFOs is false, 20% of it is true. However, the increasingly elusive Doty cannily refuses to disclose whether this information favours the exist-ence of UFOs, leaving UFO cynics and conspirators alike still scratching their heads. And yet, Mirage Men does not necessarily seek to identify whether or not these mysterious flying objects are actually the product of extra-terrestrial activity. Rather, it probes influential members of the UFO community as well as ex-members of special government divisions in an attempt to unravel the

complex web of deceit surrounding the community.Among Mirage Men’s other inter-viewees is former journalist and direc-tor of UFO documentary From Be-yond: Strange Harvest, Linda Howe. Once a credible member of the press, Howe’s reputation is seen to suffer a blow; a direct result of her investiga-tions into UFOs. Howe, in the late six-ties and early seventies, took an interest in the disturbing phenomenon of cattle mutilation. However, Howe’s claims that these mutilations might very well be the product of alien activity fell under scrutiny. This scrutiny con-cerned the US government enough to warrant the National Security Asso-ciation (NSA) to feed Howe a wealth of doctored research papers and false governmental reports on the subject of extra-terrestrial activity. Mirage Men attempts to uncover how and why the NSA devised such an intricate hoax – if there was no real evidence to hide. Cold, calcu-lated and profoundly creepy, Doty is certainly seen to play his part in encouraging the paranoid delusions of inquisitive, compliant individuals like Bennewitz and Howe. Indeed, in his transparent manipulation of Ben-newitz’s patriotism and optimistic, scientific zeal, Doty is shown to be a villainous character. However, Mirage Men, in its navigation of this laby-rinth of disinformation, reveals ways in which Doty himself may have also been manipulated.Pilkington, Lundberg, Denning and Kyprianou question what is really meant by ‘disinformation’, and the implications of questioning both its origins and its validity. Mirage Men is a chilling descent into the murky un-derworld of myth-making, showing the extent to which all ideas and theories concerning this subject are produced and promulgated by the US Government._

International Premiere: Sheffield Doc/Fest

WORDS simran Hans

a mytH tHat took over tHe world

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mirage men is not interested in proving or indeed, disproving the existence of extra-terrestrials.

film: mirAge men Director John Lundberg, uK, 2013, 85 min

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Dummy Jim is a film about James Duthie, a deaf traveller. It is a film with an exuberant visual style, and a creative soundtrack as well. But when does style start to make you feel stuck? Can creativity turn into a straitjacket?In 1951 James Duthie cycled from his small fishing village Cairnbulg in Scotland to the Artic Circle, and wrote a book about it: ”I Cycled into the Arctic Circle”. Director Matt Hulse got hold of the book and de-cided to make a film about it. Dum-my Jim, Duthie’s nickname, contains fiction, animation, and documenta-ry footage. Hulse included a wide va-riety of visual materials and sources in his film, which form several of the threads he weaved together. The film opens with a man in some-what outdated clothing roaming a community hall with laid tables. The hands of a designer creating an animation accompany the opening titles. The man is Samuel Dore, him-self a deaf man, who plays Duthie, and re-enacts and re-cycles Dore’s trip. Later we see him pack, leave the village, and cycle and camp in the various countries he crosses, all in fifties styles and with fifties gear. We observe the various countries with him and witness the tribulations travellers meet: flat tyres, a broken bike, rain, fatigue. The community hall is the site of a tribute of sorts, where children read Duthie’s poetic texts on-screen, introducing the vari-ous countries, wearing the clothes of the era. The texts also accompany the images of the trip and are displayed on-screen. In addition, Dore recites some of them in the first person. Cut with this we see rehearsals, as well as dress rehearsals, for what seems to be a commemorative event in the com-munity hall. These two major strands, the cycling trip and the commemoration, form the backbone of the narrative. Apart from the cycling and the scenes re-lated to the commemoration, there are three central activities in the film: knitting, drawing and stone-cutting.

A lady sits knitting in her wool shop, and later images reveal she is working on a pattern for a “trimly orthodox” pullover Eventually we learn that this piece is for Dore. The designer reappears throughout the film, drawing lines with black In-dian ink. The figures remain abstract for a long time, form single lines or very simple elements, the shots extremely brief. In the end they re-veal a certificate confirming Duthie’s achievement. Throughout the film we see clips of the cutting of stone. It starts with close-ups of the sawing of a piece of rock that is then trans-ported through the workshop and chiselled into shape; an inscription is designed and created, and eventu-ally it turns out to be a commemo-rative gravestone for Duthie and his mum. These three activities serve as an ode to Duthie’s times, to the era of the mechanical and the manual, the creative, the individual, in which mistakes were allowed.

Central to the film is also imagery: when Dore-as-Duthie leaves the vil-lage, a first set of moving images, part archive, part contemporary, move into the frame from the right, in a set of two rows, displaying the charac-teristics of Scotland; the country, its flora, its people and places, its food, and its flag. This is subsequently re-peated for all the countries he passes through: France, Belgium, the Neth-erlands, Germany, Denmark, Swe-den, and Norway. The same form is used for two rows of gravestones, with an initial observation about the Second World War but also includ-ing nameless ones. There is footage

framed in black, a reference to ama-teur film formats. This format is used for the visualization of an apparent love-interest: a French bike repairer’s daughter, Monique, who talks about her life and France while we see her working with dough. The camera catches her hands, her eyes and her head, like the eyes of a lover explor-ing his object of affection. Dummy Jim is a lovely film, full of warmth and comfort, sweet remi-niscences about rural community life in a time gone by. It never hides its construction and contains many reflexive moments, for instance, when Dore is directed by a voice off-screen and when archive foot-age ends; it includes preparations for and recordings in a sound studio, a boy consciously nodding towards the cameraman, and Dore turning around to take a picture of the cam-era through which we are watching him. The ode to the creative thus ex-tends to the film and its making. It’s highly original and playful; let’s face it, how many films have a credit for ‘knitwear’?However, at a certain point the struc-ture of the film becomes a gimmick, with style trumping substance due to the repetition of elements. The story is not necessarily in the individual scenes and in the events depicted in them, because these are generally short and of a wide variety. It is rath-er in their combination, in the way they reinforce each other and work towards a whole. The threads join together in the end, inevitably, when Dore-as-Duthie returns and the cer-tificate is finished and welcomed with ‘amens’ and cheers. And the pen runs out of ink. Dummy Jim has an inexorable form and becomes a straitjacket that allows little freedom to wander. The threads are – you guessed it – knit into a jacket that is just one size too small. A fray or two would provide a bit more breathing space to enjoy it in your own way._

WORDS willemien sanders

Just one siZe too smaLL Dummy JimDirector matt Hulse, uK, 2013, 90 min.

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it never hides its construction

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Initially I thought that 17.000 Islands was yet another interactive documen-tary about a place, portrayed through an archive of short videos. I was pleasantly surprised to find out that the focus of this experience is not on the place itself, but about creating the perception of a place through representation. A short trailer introduces the setting; a museum park in Indonesia called Beautiful Indonesia Miniature Park built by the Suharto military regime in the 1970s. The park attempts to pre-sent the diverse cultures of Indonesia in a condensed form - an idealized image of the country’s 17.000 islands, pro-moting the idea of a diverse nation living in harmony under a national ideology. Even though many simply see it as an amusement park without much consideration for its historical background, some see it as a reminis-cence of conformist propaganda. The two filmmakers Thomas Østbye and Edwin have filmed life unfold in the setting of this park. After watching the trailer you enter the interactive journey.Descending through the clouds you see a cluster of islands in the ocean, a map. The islands are stylized and composed of triangular shapes melt-ing together in a kind of patchwork. You are enveloped by the calming sound of rolling waves on a shore. As you hover over the islands with your mouse, you discover each of the islands contain a collage of video clips ready to explore. For the uninitiated user who is not familiar with Indonesian history, I recommend visiting the “about” page in the overhead menu before continuing, because it provides more detailed information on the background for the project. This infor-mation of course colours the way you will experience the video clips.Exploring the video clips is a bit like traveling. You are bombarded with a myriad of impressions and strange details from the park - people, displays, animals and trees. The handheld and slightly unsteady shots further the feeling of being a tourist in this place. The video clips provided seem

a bit random though, and that is a bit disorienting. It is difficult to find and create meaningful patterns. The lack of guidance and purpose is always one of the potential pitfalls of open story worlds.

However the experience does have and end goal, which many open story worlds lack – in this case the creation of your own island. You are encouraged to collect your favourite video clips by adding them to the limited slots of a timeline at the bottom of the page, as-sembling material for your own short film. After collecting the clips you can edit your film directly in the browser, add a personal voice-over or text and publish it. Your film materializes into the shape of an island and is added to a new, user generated map. The meta-phoric editing interface of creating an island is simple and intuitive to use, making it easily accessible to all us-ers. It is a kind of democratizing of editing technology. As more user-gen-erated islands are added, the original archipelago will gradually disintegrate and the map will continue to live and change organically as a result of user-interaction

I guess one intended outcome is that “reality” changes depending on who is telling the story. Considering Indonesia’s propaganda-ridden past, emphasizing the shift of perceptions makes sense. The user generated islands can be explored by other users, or shared on social media as linear films. The creators’ intention is that the user-generated films will go viral on social networks. It will be interesting to follow the effect of this and the dialogue that may arise amongst users. One important thing to note is that this interactive docu-mentary is likely to be experienced differently by an Indonesian user, than by non-Indonesian users, simply because the former have a more per-sonal relation to the material._

International Premiere: Sheffield Doc/Fest

WORDS suvi andrea Helminen

17.000 Islands will be showcased for the first time at Sheffield Doc/Fest in June 2013. The date for the online release has not been decided yet. The film was initiated at the DOX:LAB in 2011 as a collaboration between the two filmmakers, Norwegian Thomas Østbye and Indonesian Edwin and the interactive producer is Paramita Nath, based in Canada.

DemOcRatizatiOn Of HiStORyinteractive documentarY: 17.000 iSlAnDS Director thomas Østbye and edwin, norway / indonesia, 2013

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The lack of guidance and purpose is always one of the potential pitfalls of open story worlds.

46

Mother Europe gave birth to many children. She raised them with love and with care. Among the children were Belgium and the twins called Denmark. Mother Europe kept hav-ing children. So many children that in the end she could no longer keep track of them. She still cared about all of them but she had to let them go. She could no longer control them. As all children do, Mother Europe’s children grew up and be-came independent from her. In the end, the children moved out of their childhood home and created their own, unique homes. They were out of the hands of Mother Europe. They created their own rules and borders now.This allegorical story is told in Petra Selikar’s feature documentary called Mama Europa. It’s a documentary dealing on a practical level with the existence of borders and how peo-ple’s lives are influenced by them. The film is also a more metaphysical

examination of what borders mean. What is a border exactly except for some lines on a map and how do we perceive borders? For starters, borders are a human notion, a hu-man invention; a way of structuring our world and separating one group of people from another. But why separate people? Of course we can find historical reasons for the exist-ence of borders. And perhaps practi-cal reasons as well. Some will argue that borders are necessary in order to control large geographical areas such as planet Earth. Others will argue that borders and the units they cre-ate make people more competitive, more inventive. A third argument – and there are probably many more – could be that people need a sense of belonging and that this sense of be-longing needs to be somewhat lim-ited to an area we are able to grasp the notion of. However, you could find many arguments against borders as well. Why this need to limit our-

selves? Why do we separate people when we are more or less the same and share the same world? Borders lead to dissatisfaction, to conflict, to war, to death. As one of the char-acters in Seliskar’s film says: ”How great this world would be if humans did not exist”. I said earlier that Petra Seliskar’s film is a metaphysical one. By that, I mean that the film does not deal that much with a political or historical discussion about borders. The no-tion of borders is perhaps the essence of the film. And Petra Seliskar has chosen a rather original way of struc-turing this examination. She has made the film with her four-year-old daughter Terra. The child Terra (even her name is relevant) creates drawings of the world with its many countries and confusing borders. Where does Croatia stop? Where are Macedonia’s borders? This graphi-cal starting point leads to reflections and discussions between mother and

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WHy seParate PeoPLe?mAmA europADirector Petra seliskar, slovenia, 2013, 90 min

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daughter. The mother has had a longer life. She has history within her. She knows why the borders are as they are. But the child is free of history. She is not yet influenced by rules, assump-tions, prejudices and history. She asks freely and with curiosity. This is per-haps a romantic notion. Does a child have a more honest and authentic kind of access to the world? Not necessar-ily. Can the child be used in a film to bring forth something a grown-up cannot? Yes, it seems so when watch-ing Mama Europa. Terra is an intrigu-ing character. As she wanders around the poppy-seed field and engages with the world with curiosity, examining the ants in the earth, we cannot help but wonder what we as grown-ups do in the world. Not only how we create borders but generally how we treat our planet. These sentences might sound sentimental but Mama Europa is by no means a sentimental film. It’s a warm, generous and often funny film depict-ing different generations and their sto-ries related to borders – for instance a

98-year-old Slovenian man, who was forced to pretend to be Italian under fascist rule, experiencing the 1920 pogrom against all things Slovenian.

A weakness in the film is the imagery. It does have some interesting archival footage but I am not sure the present day imagery is strong enough to meet the demands of a feature-length docu-mentary. The many infantil anima-tions bring very little to the film. And the number of scenes with Terra cre-ating yet another drawing makes for a rather repetitive structure.However, the themes of the film keep bringing the it back on track. The re-flections – not so much made by the characters in the film, as the people watching – comprise the real strength of Mama Europa. Do we believe in the notion of nations and borders? A scene in the film comes back to me: Terra and Petra walking near the sea and

talking about how fishermen are fight-ing about who gets which amount of fish. Which fish is a Croatian fish and which one is Italian? How can you tell? Fish is fish and the sea is open to any-one. It reminded me of the great Pol-ish poet Wislawa Szymborska whose poems should enlighten us about the ways we divide and limit ourselves. Szymborska gets the final word, a few lines from the poem “Psalm”: “How leaky are the borders / we draw around our separate nations! / How many clouds cross those boundaries / daily, without even paying the toll!” And then the ending of her poem, and thus this review as well: “Funny, isn’t it, how only what’s human is truly alien? Everything else is just mixed vegeta-tion, a few subversive moles, and the wind.”_

International Premiere, Fall 2013

WORDS steffen moestruP

Borders lead to dissatisfaction, to conflict, to war, to death.

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WORDS Joram ten Brink, JosHua oPPenHeimer

kIller ImaGes: Documentary FiLm, memory anD tHe PerFormance oF VioLence

excerPt

Through a series of essays Killer Images explores different aspects of cinema’s relationship to violence – both as accomplice and as critic of political violence. This makes for an extremely interesting cut through various types of documentary filmmaking. We bring you an excerpt from the book below.

The Redemption of General Butt Naked, eric strauss and Daniele anastasion, 2011. Photo by ryan Lobo

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InTroDucTIonIn 1914, Mexican bandit turned revolutionary, Pancho Villa, starred in an action movie called The Life of General Villa. The Mutual Film Corporation offered Villa $25,000 and 50 per cent of the film’s profits. Villa accepted, eager for the additional finance it brought to his campaign against the armies of Porfirio Diaz. The deal required that Pancho Villa fight his battles by daylight and in front of Mutual’s rolling cameras, and that he re-enact them if more footage was needed. In the words of the Mutual Film Corporation president, Villa agreed ‘to run his part of the insurrection for moving pictures, taking a prominent part himself ’. The film’s co-star was silent movie actor and future Hollywood director Raoul Walsh, who con-sequently had numerous cameos in several historic battles of the Mexican Revolution. (And although The Life of General Villa was the first and last movie that the film’s supervising producer, D. W Griffith, would make with the Mexican revolutionary, the very next year Griffith would cast Walsh as Lincoln’s assassin in Birth of a Nation.) The Life of General Villa opened in New York City within two months of the last battle Villa staged for the cameras.

Cinema has long shaped not only how political violence, from torture to warfare to genocide, is perceived, but also how it is performed. Today, when media coverage is central to terror campaigns, and newscasters serve as embedded journalists in the ‘war on terror’s televisual front, understanding how the moving image is implicated in the imagination and actions of perpetra-tors and survivors of mass violence is all the more urgent.

The cinematic image and mass violence on huge scales are two defining features of modernity. The possibilities and limits of that image in nonfiction film – as ‘witness’ to and ‘evidence’ of collective violence – have been central concerns of such filmmakers as Marcel Ophüls, Claude Lanzmann, and Rithy Panh, as well as the theoretical reflections on ‘post-traumatic cinema’ that their work has catalyzed (for example, Joshua Hirsch, Malin Wahlberg, Thomas Elsaesser, Janet Walker, E. Ann Kaplan, Tony Haggith, and Joanna Newman). Lan-zmann’s film work, in particular, is marked by the conviction that the horror of such violence lies beyond cinematic imagi-nation. However, one consequence of imagining the trauma of genocide as inevitably exceeding the cinematic image is to neglect the implication of that image in genocide itself. Of-ten a cinematic imagination is directly implicated in the ma-chinery of annihilation. The Nazi interdiction on any photo-graphic trace of the extermination programme is as revealing of a cinematic consciousness attendant to genocide as their production of a false cinematic record to disguise the ‘final so-lution’ (consider, for instance, the propaganda film ‘document ing’ the contented life of Theresienstadt concentration camp prisoners, The Führer Gives a Village to the Jews (1944)).

In the First Liberian Civil War, warlord Joshua Milton Blahyi (better known as ‘General Butt Naked’) would screen action movies to the young children he abducted to be sol-diers. He showed actors getting killed in one film, and ap-pearing again in another film. He told the children that when they kill people, they come to life again in another movie; that made it easier for the kids to kill.2

In Sierra Leone, Rambo (1982) was a canonical text for Revo-lutionary United Front rebels, who borrowed their noms de guerre directly from Hollywood action films. As recently as 2002, Guantánamo torturers developing their ‘enhanced in-terrogation techniques’ looked no further than prime-time television for inspiration: Jack Bauer offered a treasure trove of techniques in his weekly torture of terrorists. 3And in North Sumatra, Indonesia, the army recruited its death squads dur-ing the 1965-66 ‘extermination of the communists’ from the ranks of self-described ‘movie theatre gangsters’ – thugs who controlled a black market in movie tickets, and who used the cinemas as a base for more serious criminal activity.

The army chose these men because they had a proven capac-ity for violence, and because they already hated the leftists for boycotting American films (the most popular, and profitable, in the cinemas). These killers explicitly fashioned themselves – and their methods of murder – after the Hollywood stars who were projected on the screens that provided their liveli-hood. Coming out of the midnight show, they describe feeling ‘just like gangsters who stepped off the screen’. In this heady mood, they strolled across the boulevard to their office and killed their nightly quota of prisoners, using techniques bor-rowed directly from movies. (This particular intersection of cinema and mass murder is the territory explored by Joshua Oppenheimer’s film The Act of Killing (2012), discussed in two contributions to this volume.)

Cinema is often directly implicated in the imagination and machinery of mass violence. Thus, if the cinematic image and mass violence are two defining features of modernity, the former is significantly implicated in the latter. The nature of this implication is this volume’s central focus. If the book’s chapters share a common starting point, it is that cinema offers unique opportunities to explore both the routines of violence as well as the rhetoric and imagination that begets violence. The contributions here engage with film and video projects that explore the perspectives of both perpetrators and survivors. They investigate cinema both as a tool for articu-lating histories of political violence, while at the same time analyzing how cinema itself can operate as an actor in these histories. [...]

Harun Farocki’s recent project, Immersion (2009), docu-ments the use of VR by the US Army as a therapeutic tool to help soldiers recover from post-traumatic stress upon their return from the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan. Sol-diers’ memories of what they experienced in the theatre of war (the violence they lived through) are re-staged with the help of a VR console game. In this form of exposure ther-apy, the soldiers are visually immersed in their experiences of violence and combat. Yet in a sinister twist, the identical mise-en-scène is used to desensitise pre-combat soldiers to the potentially traumatic impact of violence prior to their de-ployment. That the same moving images used to help indi-viduals forget the trauma of war is also used to make soldiers more effective fighting machines is, again, an ironic corol-lary to Godard’s proposition that forgetting violence may be, in this case quite literally, part of the apparatus of violence.

excerPt

In sierra leone, Rambo (1982) was a canonical text for revolutionary united front rebels

cinema is often directly implicated in the imagination and machinery of mass violence

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immerSion (2009)2 videos, colour, sound, 20 minutes (loop)

Harun Farocki

[Exposé – text written in 2008 in advance of the production of Immersion.]

We are familiar with worlds of artificial imagery from computer games. We would like to show how they are used constructively in ways that go beyond self-contained, fictional universes: How they are used against the sobering backdrop of military reality, namely in the training of US troops before their de-ployment to combat zones, and in the provision of adequate post-deployment care on their return.

The possibilities presented by virtual reality offer obvious advantages when it comes to preparing soldiers for the difficult tasks awaiting them in often unfamiliar, exotic surroundings.

A hybrid of actual and virtual reality known as augmented reality is employed in the Advanced Simulator for Combat Operations and Training at Camp Pendletonin, California. In shadowy light, soldiers comb through plywood structures in front of projected backgrounds. They act out stressful situations in the studio and practise communication with the virtual inhabitants of the foreign country. The scenario can be modified at any time; it is controlled by a ‘director’ who can add imponderables and vicissitudes at will. Just as pilots of passenger aircraft use a flight simulator to practise flying at night or how to respond when they run into computer-programmed storm clouds, recruits practise what to do if they encounter injured persons when searching for a house and how to form a convoy when driving through the desert in enemy territory. The aim is the same: optimising responses to difficult situations.

Precisely the opposite happens when soldiers sustain injuries in the reality of Iraq and Afghanistan. They often only become aware of these much later, when what they have experienced leads them to react in ways they cannot control, with frequently fatal consequences, and the neural pathways formed in their brains cause them to return home as traumatised veterans. For those suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, a simple car trip can become a nightmare because they have witnessed vehicles blown up by bombs exploding under roads. A family outing to a crowded shopping mall can be sheer torment because it brings back memories of how a buddy at their side was fatally shot in a Baghdad market.

Albert Rizzo of the Institute for Creative Technologies at the University of Southern California in Marina del Rey has developed a new form of behavioural therapy for the treatment of war veterans suffering from PTSD. Using their accounts of what they experienced, the reality they lived through is recre-ated virtually in the console game Full Spectrum Warrior. The scenarios devised in the lab in California are then compared to the frame of reference, i.e. they are sent to the Iraq Combat Stress Control Team and submitted to a ‘reality check’.

The veterans are taken back to the time and place where

they suffered the traumata now affecting them in ways beyond their control and relive the situation that triggered their disorder. In this form of exposure therapy, patients are literally im-mersed in the experiences they lived through during the war.

However, the traumatised soldiers do not have to face the situation alone: this time there is someone at their side – the therapist – who can intervene. For instance, the therapist can increase the level of threat and thus provide clients with the experience of coping successfully with a difficult situation. Alternatively the therapist can use the Wizard of Oz, the game’s control unit, to modify the virtual reality so as to mitigate the situation, suspend it, or break it off altogether. The aim is to reprogramme the neural connections that have such a devas-tating effect on patients and help them come to terms with their trauma by facing the original situation that triggered it rather than remaining in denial. With this form of exposure therapy, Rizzo has succeeded in finding an effective means of treating deep emotional scars that break open repeatedly and uncontrollably and help patients find closure in reliving their traumatic experiences cathartically.

Rizzo and his co-workers have devised several ingenious modifications to the video game that enhance the therapy’s efficacy even further. The veteran wears a head-mounted display. The perspective of the images he sees on the data goggles changes in accordance with the position of his head and body, and the sounds he hears over the headphones – children screaming, fragments of words in Arabic, shrapnel exploding, rescue helicopters approaching – are spatially modulated. The low-frequency rumble of engines and explosions sends shudders through the platform he is standing on. Olfactory cues can be fed in, as well: the fragrant aroma of Arabic spices, the acrid odour of sweat, biting smoke of burning oilfields, the stench of singed hair. The ex-soldier holds a gun in his hand, just as he used to on the battlefield. But this weapon is not loaded; it is merely the ballast of the soldier’s reality, for Rizzo is convinced that revenge is not the way to come to terms with traumatic experiences.

During the sessions, patients are encouraged to put what they are experiencing and feeling into words. They are hooked up to various monitoring devices so the therapist can see the curves of the heartbeat, perspiration, brain activity, adrenalin output on his screen. The various peaks and troughs in the curves tell him to what degree patients are affected by what they are reliving at a particular moment. Simply by assuming this small degree of responsibility for the patient, the therapist takes part of the burden off the patient’s shoulders.

This is not the first time wartime experiences have been reconstructed using virtual reality. The method has been used in the past with Vietnam veterans and to treat 25,000 survivors of Portugal’s colonial wars in Mozambique, Angola and Guinea-Bissau from 1961 to 1974. It has also been applied to help the traumatised witnesses of bus bombings in Israel and those who lived through the horrific attacks and collapse of the World Trade Center on 9/11. Exposure therapy incorporating virtual reality is also used to help people overcome more commonplace problems such as acrophobia, arachnophobia, social phobias, fear of flying, abnormal fear of pain during medical treatments and learning disorders.

We would like to give viewers an insight into how thera-pists succeed in making the imprint left in traumatised in-dividuals’ brains by a real-life spatiotemporal experience recede,

excerPt

Patients are literally immersed in the experiences they lived through during the war

51

replacing it with an artificial reconstruction of reality. The aim is to fade out the painful memories and involuntary mental images that cause such torment by using state-of-the-art technology to achieve a virtual reality that is as vivid and con-vincing as possible.

This new therapy developed by Albert Rizzo, Virtual Reality Exposure Therapy for Combat-related PTSD, is the focus of our documentary film.

In the fall of 2008, Rizzo will train military psychotherapists in Fort Lewis, Washington in the techniques of Virtual Reality Exposure Therapy for Combat-related PTSD; the therapists will subsequently test the techniques on themselves.

The fact that theoretical instruction and practical appli-cation will be so closely linked and concentrated in a period of two days will allow us to elucidate the technical equipment, its use, and the approach employed in treatment without the need for explanatory comments or interviews as an aid to comprehension. The therapists learning the technique themselves will ask the questions required to understand the principles on which it is based and how it works. We will not need to add anything to the footage filmed on site; it will be self-explanatory because we are there each step of the way.

As we film the therapists and test subjects, we will use a scan converter (which is hooked up to VGA or DVI and interposed between the head-mounted display and a computer to simul-taneously record the images the soldiers see on their display and the arousal curves (heartbeat, breathing rate, etc) the therapists see on their screen.

If possible, we would like to go beyond the laboratory situation by being present at three or four therapy sessions, even if we will not go into any details of individual stories and

will not show the faces of those undergoing therapy to protect their privacy. Maintaining their anonymity is made easier by the fact that their features are obscured by the head-mounted display anyway – they are already wearing the ‘black bar’ on their faces, so to speak.

To render the principle of inversion, we will also show how virtual and augmented reality are used in the training of soldiers – as exemplified in Immersive Infantry Trainer and Advanced Simulator Combat Operations and Training.

To illustrate that this kind of therapy is not limited to use within the military, we will extend our observations to include ‘civilian applications’ such as its use in the treatment of acrophobia, arachnophobia and social phobias.

We will be filming with a crew of three people (director, Harun Farocki; camera/cinematography: Ingo Kratisch; sound: Matthias Rajmann). We will be using a high-speed camera so that we will not require any additional light sources. Our approach to documentary filmmaking means we never intervene in the situation, we simply allow it to unfold as (it would) if we were not there.

Director, scriptwriter: Harun FarockiResearch: Matthias RajmannFrom Killer Images, edited by Joram Ten Brink and Joshua Oppenheimer. Copyright © 2013 Joram Ten Brink and Joshua Oppenheimer. Reprinted with permission of Columbia University Press.

excerPt

Joram ten Brink is Professor of Film at the University of Westminster, where he is also the director of the Int. Centre for Production and Research of Documentary and Experimental Film- Doc West. As a filmmaker, his films have been broadcast and theatrically released internationally, and his work has been screened at the Berlin and Rotterdam film festivals and at MoMA in New York. He is producer/executive producer on The Act of Killing (2012).

Harun Farocki was born in 1944 in Nový Jicin (Neutitschein), in the then German-annexed Czechoslovakia. From 1966-1968 he studied at the German Film and Television Academy Berlin (West). He has several publications as author and editor and has been a visiting professor at Berkley, and later professor at the Academy for Fine Arts, Vienna. He has more than 100 TV, documentaries and essay films and solo exhibitions behind him, and in 2007 was at Documenta 12 with Deep Play.

Joshua Oppenheimer (b. USA 1974) was educated at Harvard and Central St. Martin’s, London. His award-winning films include The Globalisation Tapes (2003, co-directed with Christine Cynn) and The Entire History of the Louisiana Purchase (1998). Based in Copenhagen and London, Oppenheimer is artistic direc-tor of the Centre for Documentary and Experimental Film at the University of Westminster, and has published widely on the themes of political violence and the public imagination.

Serious Games, Immersion, Harun Farucki, 2009, 20 mins. (loop)

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DVD

WORDS Pamela coHn * PHOtO courtesY of coBos films

Peruvian-born filmmaker Heddy Honigmann’s long and accom-plished career is filled with works

which reference human memory and the ways in which our layered remem-brances affect the way we tell stories. Four years ago, I was lucky enough to grab some time with Honigmann one rainy evening in Thessaloniki, Greece, where her ninth feature-length nonfic-tion film, El Olvido (Oblivion), was playing in competition at the interna-tional documentary festival.

El Olvido, filmed in the city of her birth, Lima, Peru, is the second film she’s done there. She left Peru after uni-versity to study filmmaking in Rome at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematogra-fia, and started making documentaries in 1979.

El Olivdo explores the brutal financial and psychic toll on the Peruvians over the centuries, its populace persistently cheated, swindled and neglected by its rulers and overseers. In order for this to have been possible, of course, the rest of the world had to ignore what was going on in Peru. Memory and the retelling of personal histories are the only things that keep this forgotten city and its people alive. “Oblivion doesn’t scream, it whispers. Oblivion doesn’t sob; it just cries.”

As Honigmann takes us on a journey through Lima, acting as our visual and aural guide to its deepest, most hidden corners and voices, a bartender called Mr Kanashiro plays guide to the imagi-nation of Honigmann and her quest to uncover, discover and reveal the city’s secrets and its treacherous history. He is a man who has become a fixture, a trusted listener and confidant, industri-ously schooling us in the ways of the Pisco Sour, Peru’s official drink, while

he hones in on the subtle ways in which each one of us is a witness to history, illustrating how it is up to each of us what we do with that knowledge.

Honigmann told me: “I wasn’t sure if he would dare to talk quite so openly like he did for me in the film. So I asked him very directly, ‘Mr. Kanashiro, so you agree to film with us?’ ‘Yes, of course. I will make the Pisco.’ “Yes, but there are a lot of stories you can tell.’ “Mmmm, I don’t know.’ But I knew he would do it the day we filmed. He is such an enthusiastic man; I could feel that he really wanted to give me a good story. . . . I knew it would be a great start to the film because I would have Pisco and, also – in a very open and easy way – I would have the history of Peru, the history of South America.”

To a person, each of Honigmann’s subjects (and they are always somehow, distinctly, hers when she films them) speaks from a deep reserve of emotion accompanied by great depths of humour. Honigmann notes that this is a skill one needs to survive in such a place, and claims that this is an innate abil-ity in most Peruvians, including the more reserved Indians who live in the mountains that surround the city. An-other extraordinary being that appears in the film is a 14-year-old boy called Henry, a true cypher that encapsulates all of the nuanced meanings of the film’s title. When we watch and listen to Henry explaining that he is really just a shell of a human being, he becomes the physical manifestation of “oblivion”

when this is defined as the condition or quality of being completely forgotten, a lost life. Honigmann recounts: “I can tell you that I was looking for someone like that. The title existed before I met Henry. It’s not only related to him, but I was looking for him, somebody who has no memory, whose life is so sad that it amounts to a zero, nothing. Can you imagine zero?”

Honigmann has always been quite unapologetic for her unabashed roman-ticism, insisting on celebrating the part in all of us that reacts to certain pieces of music or a certain passage of literature, in a very visceral way. She is also unafraid of feeling pain: “I’m shameless, almost, when I film. But I don’t do it as a voyeur. I’m also there with them. Many times, I’m broken. I’ve learned to control this because I remember my mother used to cry a lot and listening to her cry so much makes me comfortable with tears. I can cry a lot too when watching films when there is really anything hap-pening, a death, a divorce, whatever. Or something romantic – when two people finally kiss. So, yes, I’m like that.”

She continues: “We have this need to tell stories. But we don’t always have a listener. Many of these people I meet in all my films, nobody is ever interest-ed in them. And then, suddenly, there is this little lady standing in front of them who is very curious. I’m always asked ‘What is the secret of how you get these stories?’ Of course, there is no secret. I’m interested in what and whom I am filming. I’m not filming concepts; I’m not filming ideas. I’m filming people. I hate films about ideas.”_

DvD in ThiS iSSue: el olviDoDirector Heddy Honigmann, the netherlands, 2008, 93 min.

can you imaGine Zero?A few years back, Pamela Cohn met director Heddy Honigmann for a talk about her then newly released documentary, El Olvido.

I’m shameless, almost, when I film. But I don’t do it as a voyeur. I’m also there with them. many times, I’m broken.

El Olvido, Heddy Honigmann, 2008. courtesy of cobos Films

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